Framed spaces: photography and temporality in contemporary installation art [First edition] 9781611682052, 9781611682069, 9781611682519, 1611682053, 1611682061, 1611682517

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framed spaces

I N T E R FA C E S : Studies in Visual Culture E D I T O R S : Mark J. Williams and Adrian W. B. Randolph, Dartmouth College

This series, sponsored by Dartmouth College Press, develops and promotes the study of visual culture from a variety of critical and methodological perspectives. Its impetus derives from the increasing importance of visual signs in everyday life, and from the rapid expansion of what are termed “new media.” The broad cultural and social dynamics attendant to these developments present new challenges and opportunities across and within the disciplines. These have resulted in a trans-disciplinary fascination with all things visual, from “high” to “low,” and from esoteric to popular. This series brings together approaches to visual culture — broadly conceived — that assess these dynamics critically and that break new ground in understanding their effects and implications. For a complete list of books that are available in the series, visit www.upne.com. Monica E. McTighe, Framed Spaces: Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art Alison Trope, Stardust Monuments: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood Nancy Anderson and Michael R. Dietrich, eds., The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences Shannon Clute and Richard L. Edwards, The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism Steve F. Anderson, Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past Dorothée Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus Janine Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade

Monica E. McTighe

framed spaces PHOTOGR APHY AND MEMORY IN CO N T E M P O R A R Y I N S TA L L AT I O N A R T

Dartmouth College Press Hanover, New Hampshire

Dartmouth College Press An imprint of University Press of New England www.upne.com © 2012 Trustees of Dartmouth College All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill Typeset in Minion Pro and Myriad Pro by Integrated Publishing Solutions 54321 University Press of New England is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper. For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McTighe, Monica E. Framed spaces : photography and memory in contemporary installation art / Monica E. McTighe. — 1st [edition]. pages cm — (Interfaces: studies in visual culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-61168-205-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-1-61168-206-9 — (pbk. : alk. paper) — isbn 978-1-61168-251-9 (ebook) 1. Art and photography. motives. I.

2. Installations (Art) —Themes,

Title.

n72.p5m38 2012 709.04⬘074 — dc23

2011051354

contents Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1 ONE

Expanding the Frame I N S TA L L AT I O N A R T I N T H E 1970 S 23 T WO

The Politics of Representation A R C H I V E A N D M E M O RY I N T H E W O R K OF RENÉE GREEN

72 THREE

The Poetics of Experience A N N H A M I LTO N ’S I N S TA L L AT I O N S A N D P H OTO G R A P H S

116

FOUR

Camera Obscura MEMORY IN FILM AND VIDEO I N S TA L L AT I O N S I N T H E

2000 S 164

Conclusion I N S TA L L AT I O N A R T A N D M E M O RY

201

Notes 209

Bibliography 227

Index 239

acknowledgments This project could not have been completed without the help and support of many people. First, a great debt of gratitude is owed Howard Singerman, my mentor and advisor, whose persistent and generous support of my work has helped me in co untless ways. In addition, I am grateful to the professors in the Department of Art History at the University of Virginia who helped me develop this project, providing financial support and guidance. Tha nks are owed as well to the Department of Art and Art History at Tufts University and the Faculty Research Awards Committee at Tufts University whose generous moral and financial support of my work has helped me complete this project. In particular, I need to thank my colleague, Eric Rosenberg who has been a steadfast and generous mentor throughout my time at the university. Than k you to the künstlerhaus büchsenhausen in Innsbrück, Austria, which provided me with a f ellowship that contributed to the work in t his book. Additional thanks are due to my colleagues Gregory Williams and Benjamin Carp, who read drafts of the chapters, Leslie K. B rown, and Richard Pult and Amanda Dupuis of the University Press of New England. And m uch gratitude goes to the artists and others who have been so generous with their time, knowledge, patience, and support, including Tony Cokes, Renée Green, and Javier Anguera, Ann Hamilton, and Louise Lawler, as well as Janelle Reiring at Metro Pictures. Thank you to David Karp, who has been by my side through thick and thin. And last but not least, thank you to my family, especially to my father, E. James McTighe, and my sister, Michele Kendall, who have helped me in innumerable ways to complete this work. This is for you. Monica E. McTighe S O M E R V I L L E , M A S S AC H U S E T T S , 2011

framed spaces

introduction Across the dark space, two transparent silk chambers float side by side above oily cemen t floors in t he r ecently vaca ted sp inning mill . Through t he silk panels of each chamber, the observer can see the silhouettes of two long tables. On each table, video projectors, mounted on a turning mechanism, cast on the thin silk the image of a line being drawn by a pencil. The space is large, covering a half-acre with a ceiling supported by metal columns arranged in a  grid pattern. The p rojections sw eep a round t his vast space — sometimes chasing each other, sometimes crossing each other. An image falls on the silk screens, splits into two, converges with the second projection, and shatters into four. As the viewer stands there, the sound of the pencil hissing on the paper fills the humid Virginia air and the pencils sweep across the viewer’s body, the forest of metal columns supporting the ceiling, and finally the cinderblock walls of the empty spinning mill. Later, when the viewer sees photographs of this installation, ghost: a border act (2000), in a retrospective catalog of the artist Ann Hamilton’s work, they do not capture the complexity of her exp erience of the installation. The reproduced photograph, thin, bounded clearly by its edge, and difficult to read because of the dim light in the space, seems to bear little relationship to the installation that the viewer saw and experienced. Photographs, however, are necessary for a hist orian of site-specific installation art, as her ob ject of research once exhibited often no longer exists, having been disassembled and stored, or dispersed. Fortunately, many installations are photographed, and in the course of their research historians study these photographs carefully. Although installation art is often assumed to be an art of direct experience, it is often mediated by photography. If installation art requires the presence

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of a viewer, what does it mean when the majority of viewers see them only in photographs? As scholars have found, the history of ephemeral art objects and events, such as in stallation art, is filtered through the memories of the people who saw them first hand. These memories are often solidified or distorted by t he do cumentation t hat is p ublished alongside t he work. Photographs mediate memory; history is a representation often constructed from these bits of evidence. For instance, with Ann Hamilton’s ghost: a border act, the viewer went on to wr ite about t his installation. A t elevision show titled Art: 21, A rt in the Twenty-First Century was b roadcast on t he Public Broadcasting S ervice in the United States and showed videotape of the installation, as w ell as interviews with the artist. These fragments of the work of art may then end up in a textbook via t he circuitous routes of memory, word of mouth, art review, and brief catalog description. The few photographs and videotapes of these events are often embroidered by memory, which transforms the work into myth, distancing it from the history of the event. A student in an art history lecture hall is provided with a distilled and perhaps distorted verbal description with a single photograph of an art installation. In one of the earliest accounts of installation art as a category, Julie Reiss advocates careful consideration of historical sources to counteract the transformation of history into myth. She encourages scholars to critically analyze personal accounts, press reviews, interviews with artists, and archival evidence, such as photographic documentation.1 This b ook exa mines wa ys in w hich in stallation a rt, p hotography, a nd memory are intertwined with one another. Photography has shaped our understanding of history and memory since the nineteenth century. In the last forty years, a time in which the issue of memory has become of great interest in art practice and society in general, the theory of photography and photographic practice has become even more important in contemporary art.2 At the same time, installation art has become one of the ubiquitous, often criticized, métiers in contemporary art practice. Ephemeral in stallations t hat a re co ncerned wi th t he p hysical limi ts a nd material qualities of a si te and interested in t he viewers’ perceptions would seem to elude representation through photographs. It is natural to think then that photographs of these works are both lacking and supplementary to the work itself. However, most installations are photographed. Amelia Jones notes

INTRODUCTION

that ephemeral art practices, such as body art (and I would add installation art), require documentation to gain symbolic status.3 As Miwon Kwon notes of site-specific art, “The documentation of the project will t ake on another life within the art world’s publicity circuit, which will in t urn alert another institution for another commission.”4 One focus of this book then is to analyze discrete examples of photographs of in stallation a rt in ca talogs a nd b ooks t o demo nstrate ho w t hese ha ve shaped our understanding of t he work. A s econd focus of t his b ook is t o examine the different ways contemporary installation artists have used the installation format, with its similarity to photographic archives, collections, and e ven cinema spaces, t o exa mine ho w co ntemporary s ociety c ultivates memory and constructs history. For instance, in Renée G reen’s installation Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts, there is a ba nk of video monitors, on one of which we see Green flipping through a book with the photographs of Robert Smithson’s site-specific work Partially Buried Woodshed of 1970. Partially Buried Woodshed was destroyed, and the remains decayed into the earth at Kent State University decades ago. Therefore, the images in the book are one way for Green, who was a y oung child when the Woodshed was made , to access this moment in hist ory. In her w ork Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts, Green avails herself also of the personal memories of herself and others, as well as artifacts, television reports, and books to uncover a network of associations and co nnections t hreaded t hrough S mithson’s 1970 p iece. In t he p rocess, Green reveals this moment in history to be a complex of overlapping events, memories, and experiences that connect her personally to the history of the year 1970 and to Smithson’s woodshed. The connection to history and memory through photographs and objects is one of the themes of the site-specific installation Partially Buried in Thre e Parts. The work is a n archive focused on t his network of connections and events in t he 1970s. I nstallation a rt a nd p hotography o ften o verlap in t he practice of archiving and collecting, which has increasingly been used by artists in the questioning of memory and history in contemporary art practice in the last thirty years. And now, there are numerous installations that question history and memory through collections of photographs, films, videos, and other objects. As Hal Foster notes, these works are part of an “archival impulse” that I b elieve is co nnected to a gr owth of interest in t he issues o f history and memory in the last few decades of the twentieth century.

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Aura and Experience Cultural critic Walter B enjamin’s examination of exp erience, memory, and photography, and art critic Craig Owens’s essays on postmodernism, photography, and representation served as the starting point for this project. Benjamin’s essays from the mid- to late 1930s, including “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” and “The Storyteller,” provided basic questions to guide the research. Benjamin’s essays describe t he way t hat exp erience has c hanged in mo dernity by examining how these forms of memory have been conditioned by new technologies, specifically p hotography. In B enjamin’s a rgument, exp erience has b een f undamentally changed and even degraded in the shift from preindustrial to industrial modes of production. The change is reflected in the duality of memory that he describes as “the decline of aura.” The following summary simplifies Benjamin’s thinking about memory and aura but will provide the background for the theoretical issues in this book. In B enjamin’s c lassic ess ay, “ The Work of Ar t in t he Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he lays out the relationship between the traditional work of art and its reproduction. An a ir clings to unique, handmade objects bound to a particular place and time. These objects have “lived” a history that their contemporary viewers have not, and they bear the marks of that history in their material form. Take a centuries-old painting by Rembrandt. It bears the unique marks of its maker, who laid on brushstrokes in a distinctive manner to catch the textures of textiles and other things. The paint and canvas bear evidence of having been made in the seventeenth century. The work is a fragment of a different time and has survived centuries in the possession of various owners before it appears before the curious viewer in t he museum. For Benjamin, the encounter with this object can be described in terms of aura. Aura bloomed in the viewer’s face-to-face encounter with the work of art. “If we designate as aura the associations which, at home in the mémoire involontaire, tend to cluster around the object of a perception, then its analog in the case of a utilitarian object is the experience which has left traces of the practiced hand.”5 In this quotation, Benjamin connects aura to mémoire involontaire, which is t he memory that erupts from the unconscious and engages the subject in a vivid, bodily recollection of the past. He connects this vivid, bodily experience of memory with the hand knowledge of the person who

INTRODUCTION

uses a t ool.6 Aura also lends t he work a kind o f presence that resembles in certain respects the presence attributed to sacred images and figures. In the encounter with a s acred image, a s ense of distance springs up between the viewer and the object. However, the photograph eliminates the aura of the work of art, removing distance and making it accessible, bringing the work to the masses. Benjamin aligns the photograph with a different kind of memory, mémoire volontaire. He offers as a n example of mémoire volontaire the French writer Marcel Proust’s dissatisfaction with his memories of Venice, which he compares to a collection of dry photographs.7 The snapshot produced by the mechanical action of a ca mera represents the one-touch, instantaneous action of the modern world that is designed t o accommodate the mass es. The photograph is flat and thin, reducing experience to a set of visual information locked in a frame. Memory as photographic reproduction and archival materials, in repressing certain kinds o f sensuous information, marks the stark divide between the past and the present, between memory that consists of visual data and memory that engages more of the senses. The transformation of memory practices generated both excitement and crisis. As Mary Ann Doane writes, in photography a nd film, “ Time is, in a s ense, ext ernalized, a sur face p henomenon, which the modern subject must ceaselessly attempt to repossess through its multifarious representations. The rationalization of time r uptures t he continuum par excellence and generates epistemological and philosophical anxieties exemplified by Henri Bergson, in his ada mant reassertion of temporal continuity in the concepts of durée.”8 Henri Bergson, the early twentieth-century philosopher, had used the relationship of the photograph to lived experience as a met aphor for the way science describes the vital world. Bergson argues that we experience the natural world as a fluid and shifting continuum. However, modern science has difficulty grasping the complexity and vital quality of “life” and tries to break it down into manageable units. Bergson compares this analytic quality of science t o t he wa y t hat p hotographs a nd films s till a nd fra gment th e vi sual world.9 He already had an image of this in the work of Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies, which broke the movements of bodies into snapshots. The American scientist and efficiency expert Frank B. Gilbreth then applied these tools to the study of workers’ motions and produced films that he used to render the gestures of people in fac tories and offices more efficient.

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F I G U R E I . 1 Eadweard J. Muybridge (1830–1904), Plat e 44, Walking Taking Off Hat, Animal Locomotion, 1887, Volume VII, Males and Females Draped and Misc. Subjects, 1885. Collotype on paper, 81/8 in. x 13 1/2 in. (20.64 cm x 34.29 cm). Gift of the Edwin J.

Beinecke Trust, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover Massachusetts, 1984.6.463.

These activities were part of the rationalization of time that Doane describes. These photographs used in sciences and industry become the model for certain conceptual artists in the 1960s who draw on the direct uninflected treatment of the photograph and the form of the grid in t heir work. The serial structure of these photographs is taken up as a mo de of presentation in the work of figures such as Douglas Huebler, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Hollis Frampton. By the end of the twentieth century, the scientific discourse that incorporated photographic images as evidence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had become an object of criticism for theorists who ask how these images produce meaning and have effects in the real world in the context o f s exual a nd racial dis courses. Pho tographs in t his vie w r educe t he complexity of experience to easily organized categories and bits of visual information, and I will argue that some installations, such as Green’s, draw precisely on these photographic practices, structures, and critiques. The problem of the rationalization of time in the early twentieth century is analogous

INTRODUCTION

to the problem of photographing an installation that focuses on the viewer’s internal experience of the site. Something is lost, and other aspects of bodily experience are distorted in the recording.

Installation Art and Experience The relationship between the authentic work of art and its photographic documentation that Benjamin describes in terms of aura is suggestive when considering the relationship of installation art to photography. Installations often have a cer tain atmosphere and seek to engage viewers through more of the senses than vision. Installations are also often specific to the time and place in w hich t hey are exhibited. All o f t hese qualities sug gest t hat t he components of aura ca n b e f ound in s ome way in co ntemporary in stallation a rt. Perhaps we can say more accurately that direct or bodily experience takes the place of aura in contemporary installation art. The interest in experience in art or experience as art is not new or exclusive to installation art. It seems to have emerged in t he course of the twentieth century in discussions of the role of modern art in society. The interest in art as exp erience p erhaps reflects a “h unger for exp erience” t hat t he historian Craig Ireland observes to have emerged in the last decades o f the twentieth century.10 Even Clement G reenberg wr ites in his 1939 ess ay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” that the reception of modern painting should differ fundamentally from the experience of the everyday object.11 A decade later he suggests that the all-over painting responds to a sense in modern culture that there is no longer a hierarchy of values in society — and that the ultimate difference is between “the immediate and the un-immediate.”12 Modernist painting strived to achieve immediacy. His protégé, Michael Fried, would go on to describe this distinct, immediate visual experience as the “presentness” of modernist painting. For Fried and Greenberg, modernist painting was t he pinnacle of aesthetic experience, which must be preserved by modern culture.13 In other realms of art production in the 1960s, there was, by contrast, an emphasis on art as durational, everyday experience — experience outside the museum and gallery space. The members of the Fluxus movement; those associated with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham; Allan Kaprow; and the Minimalists advocated art as a si tuation that includes objects, performers, audience, durational time, and perception. These “live” art practices

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of the 1960s, in contrast to the modernist art in museums, were often events and installations that encouraged viewer participation, everyday temporalities, and included social interaction. Carrie Lambert-Beatty describes the work of Yvonne Rainer in these terms. Rainer incorporates everyday gestures into the structure of her dances to balance two different modes of time: the unstructured contingent intervals of everyday gestures within the formal time period of the performance.14 And the live event of performance art and body art also emphasizes the viewer and the performer’s direct bodily experience. Installation a rt ca n b e counted as o ne of t hose ep hemeral a rt practices that emerged in the 1960s. Claire Bishop traces a chronology of installation from the mid-1960s to the present based on the idea that the viewer’s direct experience of the work is one of the defining features of installation art. The chronology ranges from Allan Kaprow’s Happenings and Environments to the social gatherings in the 1990s that Nicolas Bourriaud named “relational aesthetics.”15 Bishop frames her inquiry by asking what type of experience and by extension what subjects of this experience are produced by various installation spaces. 16 H er ca tegories co nstitute f our “ modalities o f exp erience.” One modality derives from the phenomenological subject described in t he work of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty posits a subject fully enmeshed with the space it experiences, so that perceptions of self and world continually condition each other. Rather than having a stable and certain viewing position, the subject in this modality is continually prompted to examine a nd r eflect u pon i ts c hanging p erceptions. A ccording t o B ishop, these spaces address an embodied viewer who is continually made aware of her or his perceptions. The historical model for this type of work is, of course, Minimalism. Another category of installation addresses not a sin gle viewer but the audience as a community, producing viewers that are activated politically. As an early example, Bishop points to Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica’s installation works, which provided tactile experiences of different materials such as sand, water, and straw. She defines Oiticica’s work in these terms in order to shift “relational aesthetics” into the realm of installation art, although relational aesthetics also has c lose ties t o performances and Happenings in t he 1960s. These works grouped under the rubric “relational aesthetics” all require the active, real-time engagement of participants in a certain time and space. Because of the interest in face-to-face communication, direct experience, and active engagement in Bishop’s criticism of installation, there is an icono-

INTRODUCTION

clastic emphasis that infuses her work, as well as Nicolas Bourriaud’s. “Relational aest hetics” is t he t erm t hat B ourriaud co ined t o des cribe w ork t hat frames not an aesthetic object but rather the interaction among individuals and objects as designed by an artist. Bishop distinguishes “relational antagonism” f rom B ourriaud’s relational aest hetics as a n interaction t hat emphasizes not utopian and inevitably temporary connections among participants at a T iravanija opening but rather the real world tensions and antagonisms that are brought out in communities. Despite Bishop’s criticism of relational aesthetics, b oth her ide as a nd B ourriaud’s a re f ounded o n t he no tion t hat direct face-to-face interaction and experience is better for political and social systems.17 These works of art downplay the role of photography, as w ell as present challenges to documentation. In situating relational aesthetics in the realm of installation art, Bishop suggests that installation art has important similarities to performance and body art.

Photographs as “Memories” of Ephemeral Art Practices The issue of documentation has been explored in body art and performance, especially in t he work of Amelia J ones. In Jones’s dis cussions of t he do cumentation of performances, she argues that critics writing on body art have focused too much on the value of the unmediated presence of the artist in the work. However, Jones is doubtful that body art is unmediated, and using the term “supplement” from Jacques Derrida, she notes not only that the photograph is a su pplement in t he way Derrida defines it but also that there are many points of deferral of the artist’s immediate presence in body art. “The sequence of supplements initiated by the body art project — the ‘body’ itself, the spoken narrative, video, and other visuals in t he piece, the video, film, photograph, and text documenting it for posterity — announces the necessity of ‘an infinite chain, ineluctably multiplying the supplementary mediations that produce the sense of the very thing they defer.’”18 In fact, Jones claims that performance art and its photographic documentation are mutually dependent. She writes, “The body art event needs the photograph to confirm its having happened; the photograph needs the body art event as an ontological “anchor” of its indexicality.”19 The photograph frames the ephemerality of the event. In the twentieth and twenty-first century, we seem to b e fascinated by the ephemeral, by things that will dis appear, and

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there seems to be something poignant and pleasurable in vie wing a p hotograph of a work or an event that one did not witness first hand. Barbara Clausen describes it as “a moment that can be desired only in its non-existence.”20 She as well as others have suggested that ephemeral art practices need to be considered not only as specific and discrete events in time but also in terms of their reception, of which photographs are often an important part.21 The status of photographs and supplementary documents is also one of the themes of Martha Buskirk’s The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art, in which she argues that certain photographs of performances have become iconic to the point where the viewer, in an art history class, for instance, does not question the origin and meaning of the image. The image comes to stand for the work in a wa y t he a rtist ne ver intended.22 Ot hers have als o commented on t his problem in ephemeral artworks.23 Photographs both solve and create problems when we are trying to understand the past. This book does not attempt to be a sur vey of the practices of memory in contemporary art in general.24 The chapters that follow explore how photography and the related media of film and video have helped to shape our understanding of history and memory in t he context of works of installation art. Many of the works described in this book help viewers to understand the way photographs and other kinds of recordings have been used to construct memory and history in t he realm of art practice and beyond. Others try to resist the flattening effects of photography by producing installation to provoke a bodily memory. Like Jones’s work, this book too uses Derrida’s notion of the “supplement” and seeks to question the way we read photographs as documentation no t j ust o f in stallation a rt b ut als o as pa rt o f hist ory a nd memory.

Site-Specific Art The writing on postmodern theory and site-specific art that has taken place in the United States and Europe in t he last t hirty years is im portant in t his discussion. In this body of art criticism, the photograph as a theoretical object takes a m uch larger role. Ar t historian and critic Craig O wens’s work, inspired by Walter B enjamin, inc ludes p hotography in dis cussions of sitespecific art. For instance, Owens writes about Smithson’s work in t he Great Salt Lake titled Spiral Jetty (1970), which he said included not only the earth-

INTRODUCTION

work b ut als o t he film do cumenting i ts p roduction a nd S mithson’s ess ay titled “Spiral Jetty” published in Arts of the Environment in 1972. In his articles, “Earthwords” and “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” Craig Owens draws on the writings of Benjamin to argue that there is an equivalence between Smithson’s site-specific pieces, his writings, and his photographs of these works in his site/nonsite dialectic. The nonsite, as wr iting about or photographs of t he site, p oints to t he site, and t he site points back to the nonsites.25 The work does not stay put but circulates among the various elements, never wholly present in any of them. In part 1 of “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” O wens makes t he connection b etween photography and site-specific art by saying, “The site-specific work becomes the emblem of transience, the ephemerality of all phenomena; it is the memento mori of the twentieth century.”26 He then notes that photographs of temporary works of art always seek to fix the ephemeral. Photographs are supplemental to the work but absolutely tied to it at the same time. They in a cer tain respect double the work. The term supplement, as J acques Derrida uses it, however, has tw o senses. Derrida describes the frame of a work of art as outside and supplementary to it, but it also, he says, marks an absence at the heart of the work. The absence is indicated by the fact that the work requires some kind of frame. Smithson’s work and to varying degrees other works of site-specific art have this dimension. As Owens notes, the presence of photography in Smithson’s notion of nonsite adds a new dimension to the notion of site-specific art. In the more recent writing of art historians and theorists Nick Kaye, Miwon Kwon, and James Meyer, there is an agreement that there is something more than the type of site-specific art that is built in place, is temporary, and requires the presence of the viewer who experiences it directly. These art historians argue for another type of site-specific art that is characterized as “discursive” per Kwon, “functional” in Meyer’s words,27 and in Kaye’s writing by the notion that site is unstable due to the viewer’s performance in and production of the space.28 According to Kwon, The “work” no longer seeks to be a noun/object but a verb/process, provoking the viewers’ critical (not just physical) acuity regarding the ideological conditions of that viewing. In this context, the guarantee of a specific relationship between an artwork and its “site” is not based on a physical permanence

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of that relationship (demanded by Serra, for example), but rather on the recognition of its unfixed impermanence, to be experienced as an unrepeatable and fleeting situation.29

Among t hese des criptions o f va rieties o f si te-specificity a n in teresting parallel emerges with the description of memory in the twentieth century — between bodily internal memory, presence, and direct experience, and archival or photograph memory, which makes memory fragmentary, mobile, and subject to discussion and questioning. Photographic documentation is key to the mob ility a nd in stability o f si te in S mithson’s w ork. The p hotograph as nonsite is that which renders the site something parallel to language, which can circulate through publications, galleries, and museums, and be a part of discourse. Both Meyer and Kwon link t his aspect of site-specificity to photography and to an expansion of the notion of site to include fields of knowledge and inquiry. In this way, memory and history become part of the discourse of site-specificity.30

Memory and History in the Art World of the 1980s and 1990s Memory was perhaps the epistemological concern of the late twentieth century in t he academic w orld, as ma ny have argued. Artists and curators had also begun to examine memory in the context of art and culture. The debates and q uestions a bout memo ry a nd hist ory s eeped in to a rt exhib itions a nd writings, p erhaps influenced b y t he w ork o f J ean B audrillard in t he b ook Simulacra and Simulation and that of Fredric Jameson in his a rticle “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in the New Left Review in 1984. Jameson’s piece was subsequently republished as a catalog essay for an exhibition titled Utopia/Post-Utopia at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art in 1988. In it Jameson worries about the loss of memory.31 Modernism in Fredric Jameson’s characterization is the time of grand narratives that propel the modern subject through a coherent sense of development and progress. In postmodernism, Jameson claims time is subordinated to space and memory disappears.32 “At any rate, from this nostalgic and regressive perspective — that of the older modern and its temporalities — what is mourned is t he memory of deep memory, what is enac ted is a nost algia

INTRODUCTION

for nostalgia, for the grand older extinct question of origin and telos, of deep time and Freudian Unconscious . . . and for the dialectic also.”33 Jameson links t his materialization of time t o t he decline of mo dernism, and in fac t, he wr ites about these issues in t he context of that essay on the exhibition of installations at t he Institute of C ontemporary Ar t in B oston. There is a link b etween the sense of the decline of modernism, installation, and now materialized memory. The sense of depth provided by history, memory, a nd e ven, as J ameson a rgues, t he unco nscious a re emptied a nd made thin in his description of postmodern space. This space is where postmodern subjects lose their sense of historical orientation and any ability for community or collectivity.34 For Baudrillard, the age of simulacra produced rather than reflected reality. In a desp erate s cramble to recover memory, w hatever remained of t he past was preserved in what he perceived to be a museum culture. “The same holds true at Cruesot, at the level of the ‘open’ museum where one museumified in situ, as ‘historical’ witnesses of their period, entire working-class neighborhoods, li ving met allurgic zo nes, a n en tire c ulture, men, w omen, and children included — gestures, languages, customs fossilized alive as in a snap shot. The museum, instead of being circumscribed as a geometric site, is everynow, like a dimension of life.”35 Baudrillard’s ide as w ere influential in t he N ew York a rt co mmunity in 1983 and 1984. Artists, such as Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley, and Philip Taaffe, all painters in the Neo-geo movement, as well as commodity artists such as Haim S teinbach a nd J eff K oons, r egarded t hese ide as as cr itical endo rsement.36 Neo-geo, with its smooth, machine-tooled paint surfaces and cool, hard-edge abstract forms, and Koons’s vacuums and Steinbach’s digital clocks with their hard, shiny, plastic surfaces were claimed as perfect examples of art as simulacrum. Others perceived the work of the Neo-expressionist painters of the 1980s and even the work of Sherrie Levine to be linked to his ideas.37 Critics, such as Thomas Lawson also noted a revival of previous avant-garde movements in Neo-surrealism and Neo-pop, and the re-creations of Judson Dance theater performances, Happenings, and Fluxus events.38 In many critics’ perceptions of the art world in the early 1980s, there was a general sense that art movements and avant-garde gestures — art history — were simply being recycled, with retro fashion and nostalgia extending across

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the realm of pop culture. Thomas Lawson associates the sense of repetition with a completion of the hegemony of American power. He writes in Artforum in 1984, “This linear belief system has begun to fade, its practicality replaced by a more effectively repressive concept of progress as eternal return, the cyclic time of myth in which culture no longer evolves but simply revolves. In this ‘post-Modern’ world, history is no longer a tool of self-identification, and ultimately of autonomy, but is instead merely an instant commodity.”39 Lawson describes the situation of the “continuous present” in terms of both a lack of creativity and an inability to conceive of a f uture. Ot her cr itics, such as John Howell and Lisa Liebmann, regarded the return to history as a wa y to digest t he innovations of t he past a nd t o engage in a p layful s ort of decadence. Kate Linker describes the culture in terms very similar to Baudrillard and Jameson.”40 In terms of art, this resurrection of history took the form of dehistoricizing art historical styles and practices such as Exp ressionism, Dada, Surrealism, and turning them into signs to be used at will in making a work of art. Critics and artists at this period nevertheless seem to be unable to decide w hether the phenomenon of repetition is a form of market-driven cynicism or simply nostalgia.41 As Hal Foster observed, these appropriations could be either a form o f c ynicism o r a n a pt f orm o f cr iticality f or t he time .42 It co uld b e, as well, that this is a f orm of working through traumatic events — the rapid changes of the twentieth century. History or art history, if not memory, becomes a p roblem for artists to work on in t he late 1970s a nd 1980s. 43 It i s because of photography and other recording media that artists were able to remake no table p erformances, us e imag es f rom hist orical w orks o f a rt in their work, or appropriate historical images and outmoded fashion. An exhibition organized around this perception of memory was The Art of Memory: The Loss of History at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1985.44 The artists included Judith Barry, Adrian Piper, Louise Lawler, Martha Rosler, René Santos, Troy Brauntuch, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The writers for t he exhib ition, William Ola nder, Abigail S olomon-Godeau, a nd D avid Deitcher, are concerned about the commodification and reification of memory in the form of mass media images. This process of reification, they argue, results in a loss o f history, or the suppression of alternative historical discourses, as w ell as t he loss o f indi vidual co ntrol o ver memo ry i tself. The photograph is perceived in this exhibition, therefore, as an ambivalent criti-

INTRODUCTION

cal tool.45 It can be used to support dominant power structures or to undercut t hem. The ess ayists c haracterize memory in t he 1980s as f ragmentary. William Olander goes so far as to assert that this fragmentary memory is one of the chief preoccupations of art in postmodernism. Most of the artists who made w ork for the exhibition drew their images specifically from the mass media. M artha Rosler’s video in stallation Global Taste used television advertisements taken from around the globe. Richard Prince re-photographed scenes of leisure from magazines, and Christopher Williams’s site-specific photo installation On New York ii combined a media image o f a n ex ecution in B angladesh, p erformed f or t he ca meras, wi th a stock tourist image of New York City. The artists in the exhibition also made histories f rom t hese co llections o f imag es t hat under cut o fficial histories, such as Sa rah Cha rlesworth’s détournement o f a mo nth o f t he Herald Tribune. In this project, she removed all of the text and left only the masthead and photographs of a mo nth of t he ne wspaper. Bruce B arber’s Remembering Vietnam combined an advertisement/tribute by United Technologies to the soldiers of Vietnam with a des cription of a wa r crime from an official government investigation. Finally, Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibited photographs of natural history museum displays and empty theaters, while Louise Lawler showed photographs of a storage room at the Rude Museum in Dijon, emphasizing the artificiality of the museum effect. The exhibition displayed memory as representation, and the artists critiqued the social codes in images. Whereas the work in t hat exhibition centered on the loss o f immediac y, presence, and connection in memory through photography and video, Places with a Past arranged in Charleston in 1991, was organized around the notion of t he immedia te p resence o f hist ory a nd memo ry. The c urators o f Places with a Past invited artists to come to Charleston and create site-specific works that engaged t he history of t he place. A wide ra nge of artists participated, such as Ann Hamilton, Christian Boltanski, Chris Burden, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Alva Rogers, and David Hammons. In her catalog publication, Mary Jane Jacob emphasizes the idea that the works created used narrative in order to recover repressed or marginalized histories.46 The artists were expected to deal with some aspect of Charleston’s hist ory. Most of t he pieces w ere constructed in hist oric b uildings in downtown Charleston and drew on t he atmosphere inherent in t hese old buildings.

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The memory evoked in these works is body-oriented memory that utilizes the hist oric sheen o f a ci ty lik e Cha rleston. M iwon Kwon a rgues t hat t his exhibition neutralized the critical capabilities of site-specific work: While site-specific art continues to be described as a refutation of originality and authenticity as intrinsic qualities of the art object or the artist, this resistance facilitates the translation and relocation of these qualities from the artwork to the place of its presentation, only to have them return to the artwork now that it has become integral to the site. . . . Conversely, if the social, historical, and geographical specificity of Charleston offered artists a unique opportunity to create unrepeatable works (and by extension, an unrepeatable exhibition), then the programmatic implementation of site-specific art in exhibitions like Places with a Past ultimately utilize art to promote Charleston as a unique place.47

Kwon’s critique suggests that memory can easily become a typ e of commodity that bolsters rather than critiques the system into which it is placed. The exhibition Doubletake at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1992 t ook the theme of collective memory. Lynne Cooke wrote a chapter titled “The Site of Memory” in which she observed in the early 1980s an interest within popular culture a nd li terature in t he ide a o f a fa bricated memo ry t hat p roduced a convincing type of authenticity. She used the example of the film Blade Runner, in w hich one of the main characters, a g enetically engineered clone, is convinced that she is h uman because of the vivid memories that have been implanted in her brain.48 Cooke observed that a distinction exists between organic, genuine memory and artificial memory in Philip K. Dick’s original novel. The distinction does not exist, however, in William Gibson’s “cyberpunk” fiction of the same period. Ci ting H oward S ingerman, C ooke a rgued t hat co llective memo ry now has effectively b een t aken over by mass c ultural material and mediaproduced memory, which has colonized private memory.49 Memory a nd mo urning sur faced in a rtwork in t he late 1980s a nd e arly 1990s in the context of aids a s well. In 1994, Simon Watney writes that, for a community that was experiencing an overwhelming number of aids deaths, “the questions of seeing and remembering take on a very special significance in relation to aids. ”50 Douglas Crimp argues in “Mourning and Militancy” that, because the gay community had b een so discouraged from mourning

INTRODUCTION

and, in fac t, enco uraged t o hide t he de vastation o f aids f rom the greater public, mourning was in fact a type of militancy.51 Because many artists had experienced aids o n such a personal level, they found that the appropriate response was in t he form of intimate photo diaries of friends’ illnesses and deaths, aids p ortraits, a nd indi vidual s culptural memo rials.52 A different response was the public action posters, such as were shown in the exhibition On the Road: Art against aids . The traveling show included posters designed by artists such as B arbara Kruger, Gran Fury, and Cindy Sherman. The annual Day without Art, organized by the group Visual aids, and founded by curator Thomas Sokolowski, curator Gary Garrels, critic Robert Atkins, and curator William Olander, began in 1989.53 The organizers requested that arts organizations close one day a year in memory of aids v ictims. At the same time, Group Material’s aids t imeline was published in various art publications and s erved b oth as a memo rial and wa ke-up c all for a public and government determined to ignore the urgency of the aids crisis. Other aids memorials, such as the names quilt, and various other activities such as vigils and personal memorials, also served as embodiments of memory and loss. Two more books on art and memory need t o be acknowledged before I describe the structure of the current book. Lisa Saltzman’s Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art discusses the work of several contemporary artists who use various strategies for memorializing.54 Saltzman organizes the work she discusses around various forms of indexes that have b een made f or centuries in a rt. Taking as her st arting p oint t he legend of t he C orinthian maiden w ho traced t he shadow silhouette of her departing lo ver o n a wall , Sal tzman f ocuses o n co ntemporary v ersions o f shadows (i.e., video projections), silhouettes, and casts. Saltzman argues that contemporary art in many ways employs the strategy of the index as absence to bear witness to atrocities and everyday life alike. Joan Gibbons’s Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance ca tegorizes va rious w orks o f co ntemporary a rt via different ways of remembering. These range from personal remembrance or autobiography to postmemory — those who contend with events that took place before they were born — and to archives and museum collections as memory. Both Saltzman and Gibbons acknowledge one of the premises of this book, which is t hat memo ry a nd hist ory ha ve b ecome significant t hemes in a rt since the 1970s.

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Installation Art as Heterotopia Installations provide a space t o think critically about contemporary experience. For the book Installation Art in the New Millennium, the authors engaged Jonathan Crary to write the preface. In it he claims, “Aesthetic debates dependent on notions of ‘medium’ are out of touch with contemporary actuality.”55 Installation, for Crary, is not directed so much to the development of aesthetic experience as it is a response to an “epistemological crisis.” Previous to the late nineteenth century, Crary claims, a balance existed between the human “sensorium” and the conditions of perception. However, with the transfer of vision, hearing, memory, and thinking to machines, the human faculties of perception were overwhelmed by the bewildering amount of new information available. Crary claims that installation is important because it provides a means to cope with the immense changes in perceptual conditions in the late twentieth century, by testing and presenting new means of experience. “ Memory w ork” in co ntemporary a rt de als, p erhaps, wi th t he o verwhelming transformations of contemporary society. I will take up both these arguments with regard to installation art. Installation art provides a wa y of coming to grip with the changes in the present but also a means to reflect on the past. Michel Foucault describes the materialization of memory via his notion of genealogy.56 In genealogy, memory settles into material, resting in the document, the statement as spoken, written, or remembered.57 It clings to the surfaces of bodies, materials, and objects. Thus, in Foucault’s writing of the 1960s, memory is materialized, fragmented, and dispersed. For Foucault the sense of history as progressive had faded as w ell. Therefore, in the era of material memory it is necessary to map sites. His discussion of mapping sites and the establishment of relations among sites is r eminiscent of Rob ert Smithson’s discussion of both geological time and site/nonsite. Foucault writes, “Site is defined by relations of proximity between points or elements; formally, we can describe these relations as series, trees, or grids. . . . The storage of data in the memory of a mac hine; the circulation of discrete elements within a random output (car traffic, the sounds on a t elephone line); t he identity of marked or coded elements inside a set may be randomly distributed, or may be arranged according to single or multiple classifications.”58

INTRODUCTION

Within these sites there are relations that can be figured, Foucault writes, in visual terms. By performing this type of mapping, Foucault is able to distinguish between quotidian sites and those he calls “heterotopias.” Heterotopias are sites marked off from society that paradoxically connect to all other sites in s ociety. They open out as w ell onto other times. F oucault names as examples the library, the museum, the cemetery, and the cinema. Thes e are all spaces that are connected to the materialization of memory. Installations can be described as a nother form of heterotopia, a p lace set off from society where different times and places intersect via objects, materials, and images. Installation seems to be a particularly appropriate practice for artists interested in memory and history because it can take on the form of these structures that are charged with keeping memory and history: the archive, t he library, t he museum collection, and e ven t he st age and movie theater. The “technologies of vision,” such as film and photography, provided a way to ma terialize time .59 Ar t p ractice p rovides a space in w hich t o r eflect on these technologies and the way we construct history and memory. Ther e are at least two important dimensions of the relationship of photography to installation art. For temporary installations, the photograph is o ften the only thing left of the work. The ideal viewer would see the piece in p erson and have a direct, bodily or phenomenological experience of the site. When regarded in t his manner, the photograph is a su pplement to the installation, and it is read as if it were a visual document. The photograph may not be the ideal way to preserve a bodily experience, and it raises additional questions about how time is materialized in the photograph. The second dimension focuses more on the photograph as something that frames a part of the visual world and makes it mobile, allowing it to be recontextualized, to become discursive. In the context of installation art, the photograph is investigated as a mediator of history and experience. Because it is a representation, it is already inscribed and shot through with meanings invested in it by its cultural context and the understandings carried by its viewers. The materiality of the photograph is an advantage in this kind of critical historical practice, as it seizes and holds time, disrupting its flow and making it possible to analyze it. Cutting the continuous flow of time and freezing it in object or photograph form, materializing it, enables this reconsideration

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of history. Benjamin had argued that the uncertain nature of meaning in the photograph “unsettles” viewers until they are provided with a ca ption. It is the unsettled quality of the photograph that enables the rereading of it and, by extension, the rewriting of history.

The Structure of This Book This book discusses two dimensions of the relationship between installation art and photography. First is the notion that photographs of installation have shaped our memories and conditioned the histories written about these works. Second, some of the works in this book encourage us to consider how photography produces effects of memory and is us ed to construct histories via t he installations of archives, photographic images, and objects. And d uring the passing of analog photography, the book encourages viewers to realize that photographs, film, and video a re historical objects whose effects and status should be questioned. This book’s four chapters track a rough chronology, beginning in the late 1970s. The first two chapters deal with the archives of specific works of installation art. In the first chapter, that archive consists of a group of catalogs of exhibitions devoted to installation art in the 1970s. The chapter begins with a look at the role of photography in the exhibition catalog for Rooms at PS1 in Queens, New York, in 1976. Rooms invited artists to take the literal site of the exhibition as inspiration for the content of the work and resulted in many site-specific pieces that exist now only as pictures. The chapter considers the documentation of the work in t he exhibition, the form of the catalog, and what work was included in the show as well as the works that were picked up in reviews. Gordon Matta-Clark was one of the participants in the exhibition. The role of his photographs of his own building cuts presents another twist to the issue of documentation. Chapter 1 examines Matta-Clark’s artist book Splitting, focusing on the way his collages play with photographic space and their relationship to the bodily experience of his site-specific piece Splitting from 1973 t o 1974. This chapter concludes with a dis cussion of an exhibition at Artists Space in 1978 t hat included the work of Adrian Piper, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, and Christopher D’Arcangelo. Janelle Reiring, who later went on to co-found the gallery Metro Pictures helped organize the exhibition. It was her intention to present the work of artists who thought con-

INTRODUCTION

sciously a bout t he wa y t heir p hotographs a nd in stallations w ere a rranged and the way that viewers would see and “read” the work as a result. The work in t his exhib ition p oints t o t he a rt in stitution as a kind o f f rame b ut als o causes viewers to reflect on their own habits of viewing and interpreting art. The catalog had f ew photographs; instead, language takes the place of photography in this exhibition. In the second chapter, the archive is the Renée Green installation Partially Buried in Thre e Parts. Green’s work examines her connection to Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed and engages with the way a work of art has been represented in its documentation and the memories of those who saw it. The piece goes beyond that to examine the myriad connections between personal memory, social history, political idealism, and the global art world. This chapter focuses on t he films and installation ass ociated with Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts. Special interest is paid to Green’s fascination with outmoded recording and presentation technologies such as film projectors and slide shows. Green’s work also demonstrates her interest in the way systems of information produce categories and meanings. The photograph is a serial, infinitely reproducible object and is a modern means of organizing and communicating information. She plays with the serial nature of the photograph in order to encourage viewers to question how the “framing” of images and of information shapes our understanding of it. Viewers become critical readers in her installations and other archive-type installations. The last tw o chapters focus on bodily memory in in stallation art, that is, how artists use objects and materials to evoke sensuous memories. Photographs of these installations are problematic because they don’t capture the complexity of the work. However, photographs and films in in stallations in the era of digital media, as historical objects, have become a spark for bodily memory. The third chapter examines a recent work by Ann Hamilton, a prolific installation artist who has made mo numental atmospheric installations comprised o f o rganic ma terials, s ound r ecordings, mec hanical elemen ts, a nd videos since t he 1980s. H amilton is in terested in p erception and t he b ody and considers t he vie wer’s exp erience of primary importance in her w ork. Her installations mostly appear to the greatest number of interested viewers, however, in t he form of beautifully composed, richly colored photographs. Photographs of Hamilton’s work, as well as other installations that focus on

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the vie wer’s b odily or phenomenological exp erience, raise questions about the relationship between experience and image. What is lost when an installation is reduced to a p hotograph? Chapter 3 exa mines this question in t he context of her 2001 in stallation the picture is still, which I was able to see in Japan. This chapter also looks at Hamilton’s series of photographs called face to face, which I argue is a way of infusing bodily experience into the photographic image. These are pinhole photographic portraits that Hamilton made using her mouth as a kind of camera. Hamilton’s work and others focused on perception seek to provide a way for viewers to engage in a reflection on experience and memory grounded in the body and senses. The final chapter examines video and film installation and the use of sound in installation art at a moment when analog film and photography is becoming outmoded. Each of the artists addressed in this chapter made projected films or video installations that reflect on how the film projector and image preserved and shaped memory. The recent film installation by t he British artist Tacita Dean titled Kodak, the video Headphones incorporating found footage by artist Tony Cokes, and the film installation Situation Leading to a Story by Matthew Buckingham raise different questions about the relationship b etween images and exp erience in t he context of c hanging recording technologies. Chapter 4 will examine these artists’ interest in how photography a nd film a nd s ound r ecording ha ve b een inco rporated as pa rt o f t he practice of memory in the twentieth century. Installation is not a medium but a multimedia practice. I argue that, from the late 1970s to the present, photography has come to pervade the practice of installation and become the unacknowledged foundation of this now ubiquitous métier. The installations in this book bear a relationship to the photographic archive. This book examines the different ways that photography and installation art reinforce, enrich, and contradict each other. Each chapter explores different ways that photography is involved in memory in the context of installation art, examining not only what is lost in the photographic documentation of installation art but also how, in t he context of installation art, photography and memory produce new sorts of narratives and histories.

ONE

expanding the frame I N S TA L L AT I O N A R T I N T H E

1 9 7 0S

Installation Art and Modernist Painting Most museums and galleries are designed to show masterpieces; objects made and planned elsewhere for exhibition in relatively neutral spaces. But many artists today do not make self-contained masterpieces; they do not want to and do not try to. Nor are they for the most part interested in neutral spaces. Rather, their work includes the space it’s in; embraces it, uses it. Viewing space becomes not frame but material. And that makes it hard to exhibit. — Alanna Heiss on the exhibition Rooms at PS1 in 1976

In the late 1960s, major art institutions in the United States had only recently and with a great deal of trepidation brought the new practices of installation and site-specific art within t heir walls. S imultaneously, t here was a g lut of artists who wanted places to exhibit and who, as Alanna Heiss asserts, were making work that challenged the conventions of the traditional art galler y. With the support of government funds, new exhibition spaces run by artists began to sprout all o ver New York City and other cities across t he United States. These new spaces exhibited time-based, ephemeral art practices such as video , p erformance, a nd in stallation a rt.1 These ne w f orms o f a rt a nd types of exhibition practices led a rtists and critics to question the values of the traditional art gallery devoted to exhibitions of modernist painting and sculpture. This c hapter exp lores t hree exa mples o f in stallation a rt in t he 1970s in New York that challenged these traditional art gallery practices. Thes e projects include the exhibition Rooms at PS1 in 1976, Gordon Matta-Clark’s piece

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Splitting from 1973 to 1974, and an exhibition at Artists Space in 1978 of the work of Adrian Piper, Chr istopher D’Arcangelo, L ouise L awler, and Cindy Sherman. Using the idea of the “frame” as a pivot point, this chapter examines the ways these projects broke the conventions of the modernist art galler y. Two different dimen sions of f raming a re exa mined. Taking t he now commonplace notion that the exhibition space is a kind of frame for artwork, the chapter asks ho w these examples of installation art “broke” the frame and challenged t he str ictures of mo dernist art exhibition conventions. S econd, because for the most pa rt only the photographs and the texts that describe them survive these pieces, these projects will be examined via exhibition catalogs in an effort to understand how this type of representation conditions the historical understanding of these exhibitions. Because of its ephemeral and motley character, installation, in contrast to painting, has b een marginalized in wr iting on the history of contemporary art. Its marginalization parallels that of the modernist movements of Surrealism and Dada in the history of 1960s Greenbergian modernism, which is based on abstract painting.2 As artists and critics had come to realize by the end o f t he 1960s, mo dernist a rt, pa inting in pa rticular, r equired a cer tain kind of setting in o rder to achieve the sense of its aesthetic autonomy and visual purity. “The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. . . . Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial, the space is de voted to the technology of est hetics. Works of art are mounted, hung, s cattered for study. Their ungrubby surfaces are untouched by time and its vicissitudes. . . . The space offers the thought that while eyes and minds are welcome, spaceoccupying bodies are not — or are tolerated only as kinesthetic mannequins for further study.”3 This is a n o ft-quoted pa ragraph f rom t he tr io o f a rticles t hat a rtist a nd critic Brian O’Doherty (aka P atrick Ireland) wrote in t he mid-1970s a bout the conventional mo dernist art galler y. As an artist w ho was exhib iting in alternative art spaces in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s and as the director o f f unding f or t he visual a rts f or t he National Endowment o f t he Arts, O’Doherty had a n in terest in t he wa y a rt was exhib ited. O’Doherty argued that the modernist gallery continued to serve as a kind o f frame for the work that contained it and, along with a certain decorum for the viewer, dictated ho w t he a rt was t o b e s een. M odernist pa inting is made f or t he eyes alone. Installation breaks the traditional frame of art, as exemplified by

E X PA N D I N G T H E F R A M E

painting, and often engages more than the visual sense. O’Doherty regarded installation-type practices, therefore, as a r upture within the historical category of modernist sculpture and painting. It is useful to get a sense of how the modernist art gallery was viewed in the early 1970s by summarizing O’Doherty’s arguments from “Inside the White Cube.” O’Doherty began his exa mination of the conventions of framing in the modernist institution by describing how paintings have been displayed. The first article gave a brief history of the hanging of paintings since the eighteenth century, making clear how the white gallery wall b ecame more and more important over t he co urse o f t he tw entieth century. Thes e developments, he argued, had to do with the ways in which the painting frame and the space within the frame changed with the development of modernism. He points to a painting from 1831–33 by Samuel F. B. Morse of the interior of the Louvre in which paintings are hung in the typical salon style, crowded on the wall from floor to ceiling. In this setup, the space of the gallery wall is divided hierarchically, but other than that it is irrelevant to the paintings that are placed on it. It is irrelevant because each painting is a self-contained universe. With an illusionistic sense of space created by whatever optical devices the painter might employ, such as sin gle-point perspective or atmospheric perspective, these paintings become spaces that open up to the viewer and ask to be explored by the eyes. In these images, the frame is nothing more than a boundary marker. But once the flat surface of an image becomes a fac tor, O’Doherty argues, the frame takes on greater weight and places “pressure” on the surrounding wall. The relationship b etween mo dernist aest hetics a nd t he f rame as a f ormal device is more complicated. In modernist painting, the edge of the painting and the frame that formalizes it become a kind of problem. If the edge of the painting is emphasized, then the wall of the gallery becomes a factor in the display of the work. It was p hotography, O’Doherty argues, that sensitized viewers to the edges of images. In the photograph, the frame is an integral part of the work. Installation art has b een associated with the dissolution of the frame of painting and, by extension, the expansion of art into nonaesthetic realms, as Alanna Heiss’s statement above implies. In the late 1960s a nd 1970s, as O’Doherty’s wr iting indica tes, t he co nditions t hat w ere q uestioned w ere those that dictated the exhibition of modernist painting. The challenge took

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a variety of forms. If the “white cube” modernist art gallery, which displays painting, ex cludes t he pass age o f time , t hen in stallation w ould b ring time into t he galler y space.4 If t he mo dernist galler y excludes t he b ody and focuses on the eye, then installation is oriented to the body.5 If the gallery alienates spectators or viewers from their experience, then installation needs t o bring viewers and experience into the work of art.6 By using modernism as a foil, O’Doherty is a ble to historicize the exhibition space a nd, in s o doing, both define the practice of installation and derive its genealogy. In its liberation f rom the mo dernist painting ideology and aesthetics, the wall o f the white cube is punctured and the outside world is allowed in. The frame of the work of art is provisional and shifting in the practices that challenged modernist painting. Jacques Derrida asks continually in his discussion of the “parergon,” What is inside and what is outside the frame? If the frame defines in some way the actual work, how does it do so? He concludes that not only is the parergon a supplement to the work but also “it is the internal structural link which rivets them to the lack in the interior of the ergon. And this lack would be constitutive of the very unity of the ergon.”7 It is the lack that defines the work (ergon) and that calls for the parergon as a supplement. I propose that, if the frame of installation art is in some way external and held by the institution that shelters and sponsors, it is also internal. Installation always points to the conditions that frame it, and because those conditions vary among the different kinds of sites and institutions, installation also points to its mercurial identity. The examples chosen in this chapter reflect different ways of dealing with installation as a kind of frame. John C. Welchman argues that, in the 1970s, the period of each of the exhibitions discussed in this chapter, interest shifted from the frame as a literal object or limit to what Welchman calls the metaframe o r s econd f rame o f t he in stitutional co ntext.8 Rob ert Morris a rgues that the “newer work” of the 1970s expands the frame to include not only the work but also the space in which it is placed and the relationship of the viewer to the work and to the space. Most o ften, in r ecent in stallation a rt, t he a rt in stitution has s erved as a kind of de fac to frame or limit. Even the art institution as a li teral frame of four walls is not necessary. It is the sanction of the art institution, as Martha Buskirk has sho wn, t hat is r equired. The in stitution p rovides t he gr ound against which the installation becomes a form: “There is always a form on a ground, but the parergon is a form which has as its traditional determination

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not that it stands out but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy.”9 And this parergon or institutional frame can take the form of a photograph in an exhibition catalog. Given this, another dimension of installation art can be gleaned from examining the role of photography in the work. Documentary photographs of the work are usually seen as supplementary to the actual work of installation art. Photographs of installations, especially those that have appeared in exhibition catalogs, are one of the things by which installation art is framed and given “symbolic status,” as Amelia Jones says. Artists have already been thinking about the relationship photography has to their installation pieces. Because installation artists are often interested in engaging the body and the senses, one common attitude to the photograph regards the image as insufficient in relation to the experience of the work. For these artists, the photograph is marked by loss — a loss that can be signified in a variety of ways: as a sense of the passage of time, in terms of the limitations of the visual sense, in terms of the flatness and discreteness of the image, or the silence of the image. Bodily experience, in this outlook, always exceeds the frame of the photograph. In addition, photography has b een examined with skepticism in poststructuralist texts because it is a visual medium that is rooted in Western notions of rationality and objectivity. Installation, in this sense, can be seen as a critique of the primacy of vision in Western art. Artists who are interested in this dimension of installation art have, therefore, carefully considered how their works are documented. Installation, even as it lacks an essence and demands a frame, also internalizes t hat f rame, p ointing t o t he co nditions t hat f rame i t a nd q uestioning them. This b ook exa mines va rious asp ects o f t his t ension b etween p hotographic documentation and direct experience of installation art. We will also examine ho w a rtists ha ve inco rporated p hotography in to t he co ntent a nd structure of t heir in stallations, t aking ad vantage of t he p hotograph’s air of objectivity and rationality, and its ability to map and articulate spaces, to render the visual w orld meaningful, and to produce its own orders of rational organization, time, memory, history, and knowledge.

PS1 and Rooms In 1976, the PS1 arts space opened its present location in Queens, New York, in a neig hborhood t hat co mmentators des cribed as f ull o f ac tive fac tories

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and warehouses.10 The PS1 building was a disused nineteenth-century school with tw o win gs a nd t hree floors p lus a n a ttic a nd accessib le r oof. W hen the  Institute f or Ar t a nd Urban Res ources, r un b y Ala nna Heiss, le arned that the building was slated for demolition, they negotiated a lease with the city of Queens for one thousand dollars per year for twenty years. The Institute, founded in 1971 under Heiss’s leadership, took a mission to find abandoned spaces t hat could b e renovated and us ed for exhibition and studio space for artists.11 The Institute intended the old building to house artists’ studios that could be rented cheaply, project spaces where artists could develop and exhibit long-term projects, exhibition spaces, and a performance space. PS1 was t o b e a n a rts center t hat co uld acco mmodate t he ne w a rt of  the 1970s, w hich i ts su pporters a rgued r equired exhib ition spaces t hat could be altered and “messed up” by the art that was often produced in and displayed in t hem. Martin Beck notes that such broken-down spaces w ere accepted as pa rt of the aesthetic of post-Minimalist art in t he mid- t o late 1970s. The inaugural exhibition Rooms at PS1 in Queen s was intended to showcase t he way such a ne w space co uld f unction. According to Artforum re viewer Nancy Foote, the exhibition was thrown together in a matter of months but managed to include t he work of ne w and well-known artists f rom t he East Coast and West Coast of the United States, as well as Europe. Ther e were seventy-eight participating artists who chose among different spaces in t he old s chool building, including classrooms, corridors, attic, roof, bas ement, coal bin, and playground. Because the building was only modestly refurbished to house the new arts center, it was the raw, crumbling walls and warped and debris-strewn floors that inspired the exhibition. Ar tists were asked to use the building for work that was built in place and responded to the material qualities of the structure. Nancy Foote in Artforum and Ros alind K rauss in October we re t wo re viewers of the exhibition in ma jor publications at the time. Foote used the terms “project” and “gesture” to describe the work in the Rooms exhibition, which suggests the influence of Brian O’Doherty who had published two of his three articles on the “white cube” the previous spring in the same magazine. The final one would appear in the next issue of Artforum. Foote tends to focus on the best-known artists in the show, such as Joseph Kosuth, Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Serra, Suzanne Harris, Carl Andre, and others. How-

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ever, Foote discusses more artists than Krauss and emphasizes that the ways in which the seventy-eight artists used the building differed.12 Foote discerned a category including artists who focused on the surfaces of the old school building and made them part of the content of the art; she included Lucio Pozzi’s panel paintings, Michelle Stuart’s wall-rubbings, and Frank Gillette’s photographs of various walls, corners, and other surfaces of the school. In another category of artists who used windows, Foote mentions Daniel Buren, who covered windows in the auditorium with stripes, and Doug Wheeler, who altered windows with coverings of darkened plastic that transformed day into night. In another category of artists who used the structure and materials of the building itself for their work, she included Matta-Clark, David Rabinowitch, and Jene Highstene. Rabinowitch’s piece in the secondfloor corridors cleared paint off large areas of the wall and then made circles in the plaster.13 Highstene’s sculpture used the floorboards from the classroom where he chose to exhibit the work. In this piece, he used the boards as part of a chicken-wire structure for a large mound covered in black concrete. Although Foote included a gr eater variety of artists than Krauss, she ignored those who used the rooms in the building as empty spaces for sculptural scenes, as in Ned Smyth’s re-creation of the Last Supper in the attic, or those who used the space to hang pictures, photographs, and drawings, such as Howardena Pindell’s set of framed video stills titled Video Drawings. Thes e don’t seem to fit into the themes of site-specific abstract art that the review promotes. However, it is fa ir to say that these are different ways of dealing with the space of PS1. So, Foote’s categories are useful in that they provide a sense of the variety of work in the exhibition, but they are also rather narrow in that they describe actions taken in relation to the physical structure of the building. Ano ther s et o f ca tegories co uld b e cr eated bas ed o n ho w a rtists considered issues of framing and emphasis.

Framing the Interactions between Artwork, Exhibition Space, and Viewer It is helpful to develop a new set of categories in the Rooms exhibition based on a field of relationships between viewer, artwork, and space.14 Thes e relationships delineate situations produced in momentary interactions between the work, exhibition/cultural context, and viewer.

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B E T W E E N V I E W E R A N D A R T WO R K : D E N N I S O P P E N H E I M A N D CO L E T T E

These categories spring from the variations among the mutual relationships between artwork, viewer, and space. One ca tegory would include those installations in which the space acts as a frame for the relationship between the work and the viewer. These include installations that used the rooms at PS1 as empty spaces to fill with objects. In these works, the exhibition space (the walls, ceilin g, a nd floor) b ecomes a kind o f f rame t hat m ust dis appear in favor of what it frames. For instance, Dennis Oppenheim’s piece is a type of theatrical tableau in a room on the second floor of the building. Called Broken Record Blues, it is a scene of two dolls, one of which faces the corner of the room in a chair — like a c hild s ent t o t he co rner — while t he o ther lies facedo wn o n t he floor. A mark on the floor connects the two. In Colette’s David’s Wrai∕ th, located in the attic, viewers pass through a corridor to find themselves in a room hung with silk and satin where in one corner a performer is tucked in an alcove of the room. The performer reclines dramatically like the French historical figure Marat in Jacques-Louis David’s 1789 painting Death of Marat. In these installations, the walls and floor of the space, generalized and subordinated to the theatrical scene, serve as a setting. And while these works invite the viewer to complete the narrative of which the scene is a part, they do not point to the specific qualities of the building in any direct way. B E T W E E N A R T W O R K A N D E X H I B I T I O N S PA C E : S E R R A A N D R Y M A N

Part of the Rooms exhibition were installations in which the relationship between the work and the space becomes the focus and in which the difference between the work and the space is so fine as to be indistinguishable. In these, the relationship of the work to the viewer is deem phasized. Artists such as Richard Serra used the surfaces of the space as a type of ground for a physical action. Ric hard S erra’s un titled p iece was lo cated in a n a ttic space wi th a steep, pitched roof. In this work, Serra cut a trench through a concrete floor and then sunk two steel beams in it, creating a dark diagonal line as it moved across the floor. One beam faced hollow side up and formed a trough, while the other had a solid side up and was positioned flush with the floor. As Richard Tuttle remarked, it was difficult to tell whether Serra was taking advantage of an existing structure in the space or if he cut a new channel, as the line

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FIGURE

1 . 1 R obert Ryman, untitled from Rooms exhibition, PS1, 1976. © 2011 Artists

Rights Society (ARS), New York.

of the trough extended from a channel in the wall to the spot where the roof beam met the floor.15 Serra blurred the distinction between the work and its physical context. Another piece similar to Serra’s in its subtlety was Robert Ryman’s untitled work located in a small , dark room on the first floor of the new wing that looked out on t he inner co urtyard. Ryman us ed its windows to illuminate two small , pale s quares o n t he wall . I n t he p hotograph r eproduced in t he catalog, t he tw o s quares, o ut o f line wi th e ach o ther, g low in t he lig ht o f the windo ws. The a rtist r emoved a ny extra neous pa int f rom t he wall a nd adhered tw o p ieces o f pa per co vered wi th w hite wa tercolor t o t he wall ’s surface. Serra’s and Ryman’s work frames the relationship between the work and the space. As site-specific postminimal work, it is far more difficult to articu-

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late the limit of each of the elements (work and exhibition space) in that relationship, and both would have been destroyed at the end of the exhibition. A R T W O R K A S D O U B L E O F E X H I B I T I O N S PA C E : L U C I O P O Z Z I A N D M I C H E L L E S T UA R T

There were installations in w hich the relationship between work and space was so tenuous that the work doubled some aspect of the space. This category of work is described by Krauss in “Notes on the Index.” In part 2, she focuses on two of the seventy-eight artists in Rooms whose work exemplifies the notion of indexicality that she puts forth: Lucio Pozzi and Michelle Stuart. Pozzi placed paintings of various sizes in different areas along the corridors of the first floor. D epending o n t he dir ection t hat a visi tor t urned, t he pa intings could have been some of the first things that one saw when entering the exhibition. Pozzi’s paintings, as Krauss discusses at length, were two-toned abstractions whose dividing lines and colors matched those of the old, peeling paint in the corridor. Michelle Stuart’s drawings, which were rubbings of the wall and wainscoting hung on the wall opposite the site from which they were taken, were located in a corridor on the second floor. B E T W E E N V I E W E R A N D A R T W O R K / E X H I B I T I O N S PA C E : PAT R I C K I R E L A N D A N D G O R D O N M AT TA - C L A R K

Another category inc ludes in stallations t hat en gage t he vie wer’s c hanging experiences of space as they walk around a room. Patrick Ireland (aka Brian O’Doherty) and Gordon Matta-Clark explored the way space can be experienced as either two or three dimensional. Ireland participated in the exhibition with an installation/drawing that dealt with embodied seeing and perspective. Ireland’s Rope Drawing No. 19 was lo cated in r oom 201 in t he old wing of PS1 down the hall from Matta-Clark’s work. In an emptied classroom with its chalkboards intact, Ireland hung a series of ropes from the ceiling by threads and attached them to the floor. From a distance, they would appear as white lines drawn from the floor toward the ceiling, standing out as figures against t he gr ound o f p eeling walls a nd d usty c halkboards. I n her r eview, Foote describes moving through the space and watching the lines coales ce and s catter as she t ook different p ositions. Ireland us ed t he format of t he magic square, arranging the ropes in a 25 b y 25 square on the floor, cutting

FIGURE

1 . 2 G ordon Matta-Clark, Doors, Floors, Doors from Rooms exhibition, PS1, 1976.

© 2011 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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the ropes into various lengths and placing them in rows that in any direction also added up to 25 feet. It is interesting to think how this work responds to the artist’s writing on the frame and the exhibition space in his trio of articles on the “white cube,” as he makes a piece that in effect has no frame but maintains the important visual distinction of figure and ground and single-point perspective dependent upon the viewer’s moving body. Gordon Matta-Clark’s work also changes in terms of the viewer’s perspective and gains significance as an image. He took rooms 109, 209, a nd 309, which were located in a corner of the old wing of the school, facing the inner courtyard. He cut a piece that echoes the size and shape of the doors of each classroom out of the floors in front of the doorways of each classroom. And in each cut, the artist preserved the floor joists. The photograph published in the subsequent catalog suggests that the piece was playing with the notion of mirror reflections, as the shape of the cuts rhymes the doors. The photograph is taken from close to the ceiling and looking straight down into the cuts. It is hard to discern the separate cuts as they recede from the camera. And in this way, they resemble the reflections in facing mirrors, which become difficult to distinguish as they recede in the mirror. Both Ireland’s and Matta-Clark’s work focuses on t he visual in terplay of three- and two-dimensional space. Their pieces changed as the perspective the viewer took of them changed. They made the building a presence by framing it but also focused on the viewer’s body in the space. And the photographs of the work further elaborate these issues. B E T W E E N V I E W E R A N D A R T W O R K / E X H I B I T I O N S PA C E : MARY MISS AND SUZANNE HARRIS

Another category of framing would include those installations in which the work and the space involve the viewer’s bodily experience of the space. Thes e installations use structural features of the building to guide vie wers’ awareness o f t heir b ody a nd p erceptions wi thin t he space . S uzanne H arris a nd Mary Miss made works of this sort. Harris’s Peace for the Temporal Highway, a room-sized piece that functions as a framing and scale device, was built as a tunnel-like structure of cardboard whose roof descended from the room’s ceiling at a sha rp angle and whose walls als o narrowed as t hey approached the windows of the room. Viewers entered the room and found themselves in the dark space o f the structure whose opening framed the radiator un-

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derneath the windows. Ira Joel Haber and Sue Weil described being in and around the structure in t erms of being large inside the structure and small outside it.16 In a large room overlooking the inner courtyard on the third floor, Mary Miss installed a sim ple wooden corridor that drew on the viewer’s sense of perspective and her own body’s scale in relation to the work. Sapping positioned the viewer to look from its entrance down its length. Judging from the photograph reproduced in the catalog, the viewer entered the classroom and had to walk around the structure in order to enter or see into the corridor. In this way, the work positioned the viewer and created a point of view. Artist Howardena Pindell describes it this way: “One feels, walking around and into Sapping, as if one has been edged into a symbolic dimension as Gulliver or a Lilliputian.”17 In each of these pieces, rather than being generalized, as in the theatrical works described above, the relationship between the viewers’ bodies and the peculiar features of the room were called into play. In this sense, the installation framed that dynamic, momentary encounter.

The Rooms Exhibition and Photography Although t his s et o f categories do es no t exhaust t he w orks t hat w ere p resented in the show, it does give a sense of the variety of works included in the exhibition a nd t hat w ere o verlooked in t he co ntemporary r eviews. I n t his brief sur vey of Rooms, there is a dic hotomy between site-specific and sited installations that lend themselves to photographic documentation and those that elude photography. Some of these works, such as Op penheim’s, can be photographed without compromising the work, while in Harris’s and Miss’s works, something is lost in the photograph that must be made up with firsthand descriptions. Like the minimal object, these pieces depend on the more unpredictable element of the viewer’s body and perception. Matta-Clark and Patrick Ireland’s too depend on the viewer’s body, but the works reference pictorial formats. These are “present-tense” works of art. Mary Ann Doane, in analyzing the work of photographers, philosophers, and psychoanalysts in t he b eginning of t he twentieth century argues t hat there was a sense in the twentieth century that it was impossible to grasp the present mo ment as i t ha ppened b ecause o f t he limi tations o f t he b ody.18 There is a lag b etween physical stimulus and the brain’s p erception of the

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stimulus. Pho tography a nd film a ttempt t o ca pture t he p resent mo ment, which eludes human perception. She writes, But it is finally in the new representational technologies of vision — photography, the cinema — that one witnesses the insistency of the impossible desire to represent — to archive — the present.19

The longing to grasp the present is only partially solved by the photograph. It is photography’s indexicality that makes it seem to offer “presentness.” But even the photograph, which fixed a mo ment of time, always represents the past. In the photographs of the experiential installations of Mary Miss and Suzanne Harris, the “impossible desire to represent the present” is c learest. The photographs do not capture what the work is about. Doane argues that modernity is characterized by the ephemeral, the chance moment. She describes this as “the contingent” and notes that it is a form of resistance to the rationalizing systems of time that developed in the last centuries. Chance represents a rupture with the rational organization of time in industrialized modernity. “Its lure is t hat of resistance itself — resistance to system, to structure, to meaning. Contingency proffers to the subject the appearance of absolute freedom, immediacy, directness.”20 Something similar seems to take place with installations that focus on experience and perception. They offer the possibility of chance encounters in the bodily experience of the space. It is in t he failure to fulfill this desire to hold on to the contingent, to the present moment in its fullness, that the archival impulse emerges. Rosalind Krauss’s two articles published in October in 1977 a re canonical essays in t he literature of postmodernism. Her agenda in t hese articles was first to establish a connection to Marcel Duchamp in art practices after modernist painting and, second, to undercut the critical assertion by modernist critics that modernist abstract painting was a straightforward presentation of painting materials rather than a typ e of representation. She is o nly tangentially or perhaps not at all interested in “installation art” as such; it is a pretext for her a rgument. However, the argument Krauss makes about the work in Rooms illuminates some of the connections between installation and photography that this book seeks to describe. Krauss describes the relationship between site-specific art and photography in terms of the index. She begins her discussion with the linguistic term “the shifter,” which indicates a word that gains its particular meaning by its circumstances.21 She goes on to connect

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the shifter to the notion of an index: “In so far as their meaning depends on the existential presence of a given speaker . . . the pronouns announce themselves as belonging to . . . the index.”22 An index is the physical trace of something having been present, such as a footprint or a photograph that points at something no longer present. However, photographs also seem to bring absent referents a kind of presence because of their nature as indexes. The light recorded in the photograph is reflected from the object that is photographed, creating a direct, physical connection. The photograph as index r epresents a limi t — the closest t hat one can get to a moment as it happens. “In photography for the first time, an aesthetic o r spa tial r epresentation co uld b e made b y c hance, b y acciden t, without human control. And it would still be a sign o f something, perched precariously on the threshold of semiosis. As the sign most clearly connected to the present and presence, perhaps it is the ideal limit of the instant that is approached by the index.”23 Doane distinguishes between two kinds of indices. One is t he indexical trace — the fingerprint, the photograph, which always indicates a pastness — and the other is the deictic index: “the signifiers ‘here,’ ‘now,’ ‘this,’ ‘that’ — are inextricable from the idea of presence.”24 The index hovers between presentness a nd pastness. The f rame a nd t he p hotograph ha ve simila r p ositions. They point to something in the here and now but, in doing so, make it past, absent, or elsewhere. At this point in the argument, it is p ossible to pull in the thread of Derrida’s discussion of the parergon and to connect it to the photograph’s r elationship t o in stallation. “ One w ishes to go b ack from t he supplement to the source: one must recognize that there is a supplement at the s ource.”25 The instantaneous photograph approaches presence, t he f ullness of a lived moment, but never quite achieves it and therefore points to a lack or absence at the heart of what it frames. Krauss argues that, in the Rooms exhibition, “the ambition of the works is to capture the presence of the building to find strategies to force it to surface in the field of the work.”26 Krauss suggests as well that it is impossible to experience the fullness of presence in these works. She argues that, even as the presence of the building surfaces within the frames made by artists such as Matta-Clark, t he f ramed material is filled with an incredible s ense of time past: “the paradox of being physically present but temporally remote.”27 The representation, even as it resembles the original, points (as an index) always

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to the action of something in the past. The framing that takes place in these works, whether painting, drawing, or photograph, that bring the materiality of the building to the viewer’s attention also suggests absence because they point t o a n ac tion t hat t ook p lace in t he past. The p hotographic a rchive emerges as a solution to the impossibility of grasping presence in site-specific installation art. Photographs are at the same time co ntingent. A ca mera can be pointed in any direction; anything can fill the photographic frame. The photograph is replete wi th det ail, w hich mak es i t difficult t o de velop a sp ecific meaning from a photograph.28 Mary Ann Doane describes this as “giving the spectator nothing to read.”29 Photographs therefore demand a caption, as Walter Benjamin noted, or an order that produces meaning. The silence of the solitary image leads to a desire to see the photograph of the moment before and the moment after in order to discover a meaning. A single photograph naturally leads to a series, which demands an order. John Baldessari’s Alignment Series: Disaster Story Line (Getting It Straight), which appeared in the Rooms exhibition, is a wonderful example of this desire to produce order and meaning from contingency. It is a s eries put together by c hoosing a line ar element in p hotographs o f va rious dis astrous situations: “(hurricanes, floods, explosions, landslides, drought, etc.).” Thes e lines are then drawn on the photograph and aligned with a line produced by the wainscoting or dado o f the wall. “Basically, an attempt to find a st eady, straight, continuous line in a s ea of muddledness,” writes Baldessari.30 The line is a wa y o f p roducing o rder a nd me aning f rom co ntingency. Pho tographic series, sequences, narratives, and archival orders result from this desire to fill in absence, to make something meaningful from photographs.

Catalog as Narrative and Archive We can turn now to one narrative, one photographic archive gathered for the Rooms exhibition: the catalog. The designers of the exhibition catalog for Rooms conceived of it as a kind o f walk t hrough the exhibition space wi th each page representing a different room. In this way, the exhibition catalog mirrors the exhibition space. The catalog and exhibition begin with a group photograph of all the participants and organizers of the exhibition and a shot

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of the exterior of the Romanesque Revival building’s façade rising above the streetlights and a ne arby Amoco gas st ation. Photographs of the entrances to the old school building, the more modest of which is labeled “Girls,” follow these. The doors are an invitation to turn the page and visually enter the building. Waiting on the other side are not clean and renovated spaces but images o f t he c lassrooms b efore t hey had b een c leaned u p f or t he sho w. Floorboards are torn up and resting in corners. Paint peels from the wall, and old desks and chalkboards await removal. These pages represent what greeted the artists as they began to make their work. The next f ew pages show artists working in e ach of their spaces. I n one, John Baldessari leans against the wall of a corridor, bearded chin in hand, as he contemplates a series of photographs on the wall. In the next pages, we see people working on Jennifer B artlett’s piece, hanging up her ena mel plates; Matta-Clark tearing up floorboards; and Jene Highstene regarding a chickenwire and board structure covered with black concrete. These action shots are intended to demonstrate how PS1 differs from the traditional art gallery and museum space, which artists are not permitted to “mess up,” by giving us a sense of how an artist goes through the process of making a work. They also suggest that the process of production and the site were to the work in Rooms as important as the final work itself. The layout of the catalog is an attempt to solve the problem of representing the exp erience of a b ody moving t hrough t he space o f t he exhibition. The catalog uses the turning of pages to suggest movement from one room to the next. But the designers chose to give not just a diachronic sense of the layout but also a synchronic one with a nod to later art historians who would be interested in understanding the arrangement of the show. For each floor there is a list o f participating artists along with the number of the room in which their work was exhibited and a ground plan showing the relative size of each space and its location in the building. In this way, the reader gets a sense of how the show was divided up and arranged. It is the exhibition space that provides the ground for the narrative to unfold, while the photographs map that unfolding, and in this process, the space of installation becomes an articulated space that must be read. Nancy Foote speaks to this in her r eview as w ell. She argues that the arrangement of the show contributed to the content of the theme in w hich context becomes a

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kind of content. In the catalog and photographic documentation of the work, the space is laid out for the viewer, but there is also movement through time at different scales. In the individual photograph we have a sense of the temporal and temporary quality of the work due to the nature of the photograph, which records a moment in time, but also a sense of movement through the space of the exhibition as one turns the pages. Foote makes the claim that each installation in t he exhibition influenced the view of the next installation and that, because of this, an overall aesthetic issue became clearer: “Installations and projects are rarely called upon to socialize, since they usually have the place to themselves. . . . But as one picked one’s wa y t hrough t he r ubble f rom p iece t o p iece, s omething o f t he s ame phenomenon began to occur. Installation itself, not individual projects, became the esthetic issue.”31 The issue that Foote describes can be stated as “How does one make an installation?” and when one considers this question, installation becomes a defined art form, such as sculpture and painting, rather than one that responds to its site. In focusing on this dimension of the show, the building recedes from our consideration of the work. Despite the emphasis on the old building and its qualities as a space for showing art, it remained relatively neutral as a frame for the art. The photographs of these pieces and the catalog do two things in relation to the work in the exhibition. First, they map the space of the exhibition. This mapping made it possible for me to develop the categories of work that are outlined in the preceding paragraphs. Second, the sequence of photographs on s eparate pag es p rovides a na rrative t hread t hrough t he sho w, w hich mimics a visi tor’s walk t hrough the space o f the PS1 b uilding. The catalog acknowledges time as pa rt of t he w orks in t he show, as a n element of t he work or in the ephemeral nature of many of the pieces, which in turn situates the exhibition as pa rt of t he genre of process art and site-specific art. The catalog demonstrates to the potential audiences at PS1 no t only the quality and expanse of the exhibition space but also its curatorial mission. As Alanna Heiss noted, PS1 was started to nurture the new art practices that did not fit comfortably in t he mo re est ablished m useums in t he New York a rea. The exhibition and the production of the catalog have secured Rooms’ place in the art institution and in art history. The photographs and the catalog itself serve as an archive for the show, giving it symbolic value, and rendering it an object of art historical classification and study.

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Breaking the Frame: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting I like very much the idea of breaking frames — the same way I cut up buildings. I like the idea that the sacred photo framing process is equally “violatable.” And I think that’s partly a carry over from the way I deal with structures to the way that I deal with photography. That kind of rigid, very academic, literary convention about photography, which doesn’t interest me. Oh, it’s not that it really doesn’t interest me. It’s that I find that for what I do, it’s necessary to break away from it. — Gordon Matta-Clark, Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings

Gordon Matta-Clark’s work bridges the division between installations or sited works preoccupied with the viewer’s bodily experience and installations that can be photographed. Matta-Clark’s work can be considered a study of frames in installation art and in photography. Commentators, such as artist Joseph Kosuth, regarded Matta-Clark’s photographs as extraneous to his larger body of work, but Matta-Clark himself was aware that site-specific installation is bound to the photographic medium. Photographs, like Matta-Clark’s building cuts, engage the issues of the representation of space, the passage of time, and the production of history. This was an important aspect of Matta-Clark’s work, and he seemed fascinated by different ways one can explore a space: by a moving perceiving body and with the eyes alone in photographs. The photo collages that he published in his artist’s book Splitting go beyond the Rooms catalog in exploring the differences between space explored by the embodied eye and space explored by the camera. Matta-Clark’s photographs also reflect an interest in time and rates of transformation, experienced by the body and the environment. In a general sense, Matta-Clark’s work outlines some of the primary concerns of site-specific installation art. Not only do his b uilding c uts s eek to grasp the exhibition space as a co mprehensive object or situation, but they also make t he vie wer s ensitive to t he alterations in t hat space. Installation brings the structure of the exhibition space in as o ne of the elements in the work, but even more, it positions the viewer as an active perceiving agent. Recognizing the importance of documentation in his work, he tried various photographic solutions to the problem — from deadpan black-and-white snapshot do cumentation t o large-scale Cibac hromes t hat s erved as visual interpretations of the bodily experience of his spaces. 32 He was interested in photography both as a self-sustaining process generated by a reaction to light

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and as s omething that recorded his ep hemeral site-specific work. Thes e interests are present in his work from its beginning. Matta-Clark graduated from Cornell University with a degree in architecture in 1968 but stayed on in Ithaca, New York, before moving back to New York City. His first photo-documented site-specific piece was Rope Bridge of 1968, where he strung ropes woven like a cat’s cradle over a dramatically deep gorge in Ithaca. In the photograph, the thin tracery of rope is drawn like a delicate line across the surface of the image as a snowbound and icy waterfall cascades in the background. Shortly after he made t his piece, he helped with the Earth Art exhibition organized by Willoughby Sharp that included the work of artists such as Dennis Oppenheim and Robert Smithson. As has been remarked by Pamela Lee and others, Robert Smithson’s work was an important influence on Matta-Clark’s work. For the exhibition, Smithson made works that compared mirrors to photographs, by placing large, square mirrors and photos in the landscape around Ithaca and then re-photographing them. These pieces, related to Smithson’s mir ror displacements, connected photography directly to sited works. As Matta-Clark was em barking on his career as a n artist, the question of the status of representations and documentation of site-specific work was very much in the air. Smithson’s work, as Craig O wens w ould la ter wr ite, b roke wi th t he co nventions o f mo dernist “presentness” by insisting that representation in the form of photographs and language be at the heart of his piece. Matta-Clark, too, was in terested in est ablishing a b reak with modernism in his own work. There is in Matta-Clark’s opinions and work already a critique of the scientific and rational aspects of modernity as represented by his rejection of the modernist ideology and principles being taught by his professors at the School of Architecture at Cornell University. As the art historian L ee has demo nstrated, his w ork was in dialog wi th b ut als o r ejected many conventions and values of modernist architecture, including its faith in modernist utopian ideas of progress. He was sk eptical of the notion that life can be improved by following principles of rational design.33 In reaction against these ideas, Matta-Clark was fascinated with natural and organic processes of growth and decay, and the possibility of an architecture based on reuse rather than the new. Part of Matta-Clark’s response to modernism was a critical examination of the function of frames: from the frame of the cultural institution to the frame

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of the image. O’Doherty and Matta-Clark share the opinion that the frame of the work of art is s omething that not only confines but also defines and reveals new information to the viewer. Matta-Clark’s photographs explore the formal and conceptual complexity of framing. And his work bridges the literalness of the frame in modernism and the ideological dimensions of framing that would come to preoccupy postmodernist critique. O’Doherty argues that the frame is more than a formal device and regards it as a metaphor for the confining formalism of 1960s modernism, which he connects to an almost p uritanical denial o f t he vie wer’s b ody. In t his disavowal of the body, a disembodied “eye” is elevated. O’Doherty argues against the h ygienic c leanliness o f t he “ white c ube” in fa vor o f s omething w here time, dir t, a nd, most o f all , t he vie wer’s b ody as a b ody is allo wed access. O’Doherty associates the sullying of the modernist art gallery with a collage aesthetic that can be traced to Surrealism and Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau. By inviting in processes of time, dirtying, and decay as part of his work, MattaClark’s site-specific installation art broke with the conventions of modernism as well. The fascination with organic processes and decay was a b reak with modernist no tions o f sim plicity, c larity, a nd visuali ty in a rchitecture a nd painting. He objected to modernist architecture’s emphasis on innovation by describing it as hygienic and antihistorical. I am experimenting with alternative uses of space that are most familiar. I like to think of these works as by-passing questions of imaginative design by suggesting ways of rethinking what is already there. I do not want to create a totally new supportive field of vision, of cognition. I want to reuse the old one, the existing framework of thought and sight. I am altering the existing units of perception normally employed to discern the wholeness of a thing. It is an organic response to what already has been well done. More than a call for preservation, this work reacts against a hygienic obsession in the name of redevelopment which sweeps away what little there is of an American past, to be cleansed by pavement and parking. What might have been a richly layered underground is being excavated for deeper new building foundations.34

Greenbergian mo dernism’s ele vation o f visio n as t he su preme aest hetic sense has its roots in Western traditions in which vision is connected to reason and knowledge.35 Single-point perspective assumes t hat light travels in straight lines and that vision is determined by specific geometric principles,

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namely, the visual pyramid or angle whose apex ends at the viewer’s eye but that also sweeps out a view of a space that seems consistent and measurable. The image that renders an illusionistic three-dimensional space a nd can be mapped out appears to be a visual a nalog to the space in w hich the viewer stands.36 In this type of visual space, the image directs where a viewer should stand in order to see it correctly. In such a space, too, the viewer can ignore the frame that encloses it, even as t he frame is part of the geometric space t hat renders the image comprehensible and measurable. Many theorists have connected single-point perspective and the space it renders with certain kinds of Western ideologies, such as the notion of a centered, rational subject for whom the visual space is rendered an object of study and knowledge.37 The space of vision rendered by the photograph is connected to this one-point perspective developed in painting space in early modern Europe but also differs from it as well. The photographic process is charged with authority because it imitates the way t hat vision works, w here lig ht traveling in stra ight lines falls o n a photosensitive surface. And photographic images, like the process of vision, are produced in whole at once without the need for human intervention. According to the art historian David Summers, “Photography imitates vision as a physical process, on the assumption that it is a physical process, and the analogy inherent in this imitation implies that vision and photography are events of th e sa me ki nd.”38 Pho tography is t hen co nnected t o t he dis courses o f knowledge based on vision and rationality in Western traditions. Furthermore, the photograph suggests that any event can be framed, captured, and rendered part of a discourse of knowledge. When a frame encloses an imag e space t hat is o rganized acco rding t o sin gle-point p erspective, i t produces a “viewer space” where the image is made in such a way that it acknowledges the viewer that looks at it.39 The space shown within the frame continues beyond the frame, as in a la ndscape, but cannot be seen by the viewer because the frame provides a limit. What is enclosed by this space is arbitrary and is no t dep endent on architecture within the image. It is as if what is enclosed in this space is “cut from” a larger view.40 The camera can be pointed in any direction to frame an arbitrary portion of the field of vision. Photography acknowledges contingency. What is taken is a f ragment of the visual field that nevertheless always has a cer tain relationship to the viewer who is positioned upright and facing the image. Cameras are able to provide images of spaces that appear to be the type of space that the viewer can enter,

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a consistent three-dimensional space subject to the same forces as the viewer’s space but that are in fact spaces the viewer can enter only with the eyes. The camera and photographic image seem to render the world open and available, if not to the human body then at least to the eye of a body standing still, upright, and facing forward. However, it always falls short, as Amelia Jones notes. Matta-Clark acknowledged that a viewer’s perception always exceeds that of a camera, and hence, the photograph was inadequate to record the experience of a body moving through a space. I started out with an attempt to use multiple images to try and capture the all-around experience of the piece. It is an approximation of this kind of ambulatory “getting to know” what the space is about. Basically it is a way of passing through the space. One passes through in a number of ways; one can pass through by just moving your head; or [by] simple eye movements which defy the camera. You know it’s very easy to trick a camera, to outdo a camera. With the eye’s peripheral field of vision, any slight movement of the head would give us more information than the camera ever had.41

To understand t he dilemma t hat Matta-Clark faced in do cumenting his site-specific pieces and exhibiting the photographs in a gallery, it may be useful to consider Henri Bergson’s ideas about the “vitality” of bodily perception and experience. In Bergson’s epistemology described in his 1911 b ook Creative Evolution, a division occurs between the continuous and vital experience, and the fragmentary and dispersed images produced by modern science and technology. Bergson argues that continuity and flux characterize the natural world and our experience of it. Modern science, however, has difficulty grasping the complexity of the perpetual differentiation and vitality of “life” and tries to break it down into units. In Bergson’s characterization, the scientific approach to perception is modeled on photography and film. Consciousness takes snapshots of the perpetual movement and, based on these frozen instants, establishes ideas about form, essence, and laws of change. A v isual analogy for Bergson’s description is Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies of the 1880s. These images of men, w omen, and animals moving through spaces o r performing athletic maneuvers provide the scientist or artist with not only the opportunity to study the position and gestures of a body as it occupies space at any instant in time b ut als o, with each successive image, a s ense of that body as it moves in time.

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These imag es o f t he na tural w orld ob tain t he ill usion o f co ntinuity b y being linked, either placed side by side or, in film, run through a projector that gives the illusion of continuous movement. In Bergson’s description of perception as des cribed by science of the early twentieth century, one moment follows another, like the frames of a film. 42 Bergson writes, “We may therefore sum u p what we have been saying . . . that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is o f a ci nematographical kind.”43 In Bergson’s analogy, time and experience, vital and fluid, decay into spatialized units in scientific perception — something material, dispersed, and rationalized. Experience as captured by scientific, modern technology for Bergson is drained and empty. Photography and film provided him with the figures necessary to articulate the characteristics of the natural world as captured and measured by science. In this analogy, we already see photography being cast as a negation or a reduction of “vitality” or “life.” If t he p hotograph ca n b e co nsidered a n in strument o f mo dernist discourses of knowledge, science, and rationalism, as Bergson suggests, it can also historically be considered part of the discourse of natural philosophy and alchemy. Matta-Clark was als o interested in t hese ideas; he t hought of photography in t erms of growth, development, and decay. In 1969, he had moved to New York and began combining the chemical processes of cooking and p hotography w hen he made a s eries o f p ieces f or a n exhib ition ti tled Documentations at the John Gibson Gallery in which he fried photographs in the gallery. At the end of the year, he sent out boxes with small, fried Polaroid sna pshots coa ted in g old le af t hat dep icted a Chr istmas tr ee.44 In drawing the Polaroid photograph into the realm of stovetop cooking, MattaClark’s w ork r ecalls t hat p hotography b egan as a mateur exp eriments t hat considered the process of capturing one of many natural processes that were being discovered and exploited in t he nineteenth century. The result of the photographic experiment was a n object that combined science and nature. Mary Warner Marien in her c ultural history of photography notes two perceptions of photography in its early days that support or reinforce the notion of t he photograph as a “ fragment of nature.”45 The first is t he nineteenthcentury perception of the photograph as not the result of a mechanical technique but rather a natural process that has been captured by the apparatus of p hotography. S he q uotes L ouis-Jacques M andé D aguerre w ho ass erted, “The Daguerreotype is no t an instrument which serves to draw nature; but

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a  chemical a nd p hysical p rocess w hich gi ves her t he p ower t o r eproduce herself.”46 Marien no tes t hat t his p erception o f t he p hotograph em phasized i ts spontaneity — the magical appearance of the image on the negative — and its accuracy. These traits gave the photograph the merit of natural genius, Marien argues. In other words, it is something that is not achieved through painstaking craft or an artifice but rather wells up out of the natural world itself. The photograph obtained its connotations of innocence, objectivity, and universality from these perceptions. At the same time, because it is produced by a sophisticated mechanical technique, the photograph was als o perceived to be a s cientific object. Matta-Clark’s cooked Polaroids recall the earliest experiments in photography, which were as much a co oking experiment with exotic chemicals and natural processes as a nything else. Nicéphore Niépce, who p roduced t he first successf ul p ermanent p hotograph, exp erimented with bitumen of Judea, derived from oil, oil of lavender, silver chloride, and iodine. Daguerre developed and perfected the process that ended by developing the image with mercury fumes. Matta-Clark’s experiments with agar, a gelatinous, nutritious environment for laboratory bac teria, als o sug gest a fas cination with subst ances t hat develop and decay when placed in the light. In 1969, Matta-Clark began a series of pieces made f rom agar, sperm oil, vegetable and animal substances, and other materials that were mixed up into metal pans and placed in the air to become cultures for bacteria and mold. The interaction of the microscopic organisms and natural substances soon produced exotic colors and shapes.47 In some of these, he placed a drop of mercury, perhaps as a reference to those earlier p hotographic exp eriments. M atta-Clark inc luded t hese p ieces in a work titled Museum at the Bykert Galler y in N ew York in 1970. Thes e unusual works of art and chemistry caught the attention of the gallerist Holly Solomon w ho b ought s ome o f t he p ieces a nd hung t hem u p in her ho me where they continued to change. After a while they became fragile and began to deteriorate.48 Matta-Clark soon made a nother flammable version of the agar pieces in which he dried and then burned the substance. He called these pieces Incendiary Wafers, and they were dangerous objects to exhibit or even have around. But they too hearken back to the dangerous production of plastics in the early days. Substances, such as celluloid, used in filmmaking, involved cooking up

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the chemicals and running the plastic through machines to produce film in factories where water dripped from the ceilings in order to prevent the random fires that would spring up.49 In each of Matta-Clark’s organic-chemical pieces, as in these photographic processes, organic and chemical elements are catalyzed by the application of light and heat. And although these pieces involve the process of development and growth, they also incorporate the process of decay, as do es the photograph. The Incendiary Wafers are literally used up and destroyed as they fill out their lives as artworks. Within a few months, Matta-Clark would be observing t he s ame process with t he cherry tree t hat he p lanted in t he dark basement of 112 G reene Street and kept alive for three months with artificial light. When it died, Matta-Clark commemorated the life and death of the tree by taking its remains and burying them under a sla b of concrete in the basement. In these pieces and in his la ter building works that involve photography, arcs o f de velopment, deca y, a nd dis appearance a re ma pped o ut a t va rious scales, some quick, as in Incendiary Wafers, and some that have lasted centuries as in his building cuts in seventeenth-century townhouses in Paris, titled Conical Intersect. By setting up these processes or by doing the work of cutting through the walls of buildings that will soon be destroyed, Matta-Clark is placing a kind of narrative frame or developmental frame around a process that takes place within a certain space and time. These processes involved not only the establishment of a form, the growth of a material, but also its decline and rot, which Matta-Clark seemed to regard as essential to acknowledge in the artwork.50

Site-Specific Art and Frames In Matta-Clark’s treatment of his cut buildings, there is an acknowledgment of the object-like quality of the structure, its immediacy as a work and as an opportunity to examine b odily exp erience in t he present moment.51 Ho wever, the work always guides the viewer’s attention to the development of the site and the artwork over time. In this way, there is a synchronic dimension to t he work, in w hich t he material and str uctural asp ects of t he space are highlighted a nd p ut f orth f or in spection. H owever, t here is al ways a diachronic dimension that is highlighted in the work, an acknowledgment that

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processes of development and decay in time take place at many levels.52 In this way, Matta-Clark’s work resembles that of other site-specific artists, such as Robert Smithson. Smithson’s work acknowledges that entropy will inevitably act on the site of the work. And Smithson conceived the documentation of the site and even language in the form of essays to be part of the original site-specific work.53 Matta-Clark’s dynamic of site and photograph clarifies one asp ect of his site-specific installation art: photographs of installations, as do in stallations themselves, ac knowledge t he dimen sions o f space a nd time — and time a t many different scales. In his still photography, there is an acknowledgment of the same synchronic and diachronic dimensions. The photographs sweep out the visual space of the architectural intervention, but they are also part of the diachronic dimension of the work. The photographs acknowledge the duration of the process of making the work, as well as its destruction. The act of cutting through from one space to another produces a certain complexity involving depth perception. Aspects of stratification interest me more than the unexpected views which are generated by the removals — not the surface but the thin edge, the severed surface that reveals the autobiographical process of its making. There is a kind of complexity which comes from taking an otherwise completely normal, conventional, albeit anonymous situation and redefining it, retranslating it into overlapping and multiple readings, conditions of past and present.54

In the quotation above, Matta-Clark invites the viewer to think about the issue of framing, representation, and display. The wall, Matta-Clark argued, and t he edg e produced by t he c ut not only produced a sha pe but als o revealed a process of making — both the making of the wall and the production of the cut. This suggests that Matta-Clark was thinking of his work in terms of labor — both the labor of those who erected those buildings and his own when they were cut. The photographs of Splitting as well as the film acknowledge this aspect of labor. In des cribing his w ork as r evealing t he p rocess o f makin g, Matta-Clark implies that somehow this process of production has been hidden in the final product. His statement points to another way that the piece of wall is framed and that is in terms of “cutting.” In Marx’s description of industrial production, the product is a result of not a work process but rather specialized systems of

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work that are unified only in the commodity. In a similar fashion, in the commodity, the traces of labor time a re erased or illegible.55 In making the cut, what Matta-Clark revealed is a p rocess of production and the effect of the passage of time in the static and permanent structure of the building. Ther e are multiple time scales being exposed in Matta-Clark’s work: the process of producing the structure, the effect of time and weather on the structure, and the process of making the cut. The final work and the photographs document the physical labor and time that was required to cut through the wall.

The Artist’s Book Splitting as Time Frame and Archive Matta-Clark’s piece Splitting combined both the alteration of a single structure and a record of spatial transformation in terms of a series of photo collages based on pictures taken of the interior and exterior of the house. MattaClark obtained the building from Holly and Horace Solomon, who owned the la nd in En glewood, New Jersey, o n w hich t he small ho use s at. MattaClark’s idea for the work was simple enough: to cut the house down its center from the roof to the foundation and then to alter the foundation so the cut would be opened up like a crac k down the center of the house.56 The work was labor intensive, as testified by the film Matta-Clark produced to record the process of making the piece. In the end, it produced not only a space that was complex for a vie wer who walked through it but also a w ork that was complex in terms of the way it marked and framed time and history. Matta-Clark commented that he ho ped the alterations in a sim ple structure like a sub urban house would lead the viewer to pay attention to those aspects of the structure that had b een taken for granted: “You see that light enters places it otherwise couldn’t. Angles and depths can be perceived where they should have been hidden. Spaces are available to move through that were previously inaccessible. My hope is [t hat] the dynamism of the action can be seen as a n alternative vocabulary with which to question the static inert building environment.”57 In 1974, a rtist a nd cr itic Al B runelle wr ote a bout visi ting Splitting in a gallery-sponsored bus trip out to the New Jersey site. He describes what it was like to be in t he house. He, like many other writers, described how the light that entered through the cut was knife-like and surprising. The experience of walking through the house freshened his perceptions of such quotid-

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FIGURE

1 . 3 G ordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, documentation, 1974. © 2011 Estate of Gordon

Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

ian architecture: “The entire web of meaning and associations generated by structures, and more particularly, houses, is left unburdened, freed from the weight of habitual assumptions.”58 The house seemed lighter in terms of both illumination and atmosphere. Another commentator notes that it became more and more intimidating to cross the cut because, as one climbed the stairs, the gap between the two halves became wider and wider. The cut both joined inside and outside and made the interior a challenge to negotiate and to comprehend, even as it exposed the things that were hidden in a normal house: the basement and the attic. In the act of cutting open the house, privacy was e vacuated from the house. It was a way of opening up an entire history and set of practices around domestic living that have become so habitual as to be invisible. In looking at the small book Splitting that Matta-Clark produced after the project, it is clear that he wanted to emphasize not only the object-like quality of the small b uilding when it was c ut but also that this project was a small

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slice o ut o f t he lo nger hist ory o f t he ho use. W hile t urning t he pag es, t he viewer gets a v ery clear sense that this was a p roject that had a b eginning and an end that coincided with the demise of the old house itself. The book is small and cheaply produced with grainy black-and-white photographs. It is only thirty-four pages long and tells a st ory of the discovery of the house, its alteration, and final demise. With each page, the viewer moves not only through the house but also through time as the project goes forward.59 In the book, the photographs become the body of the house, and they define the space and limits of the house for the viewer. There are two kinds of images in the book: mug shots, which is a term that Anne Wagner uses, of the house, showing t he façades a nd sides o f t he str ucture, and complex photo collages that show the alteration to the interior spaces of the house that took place when it was c ut.60 The mug shots also serve as a s eries of before and after images that demonstrate what happened to the house from the outside. They are comical because they show the house as a diminutive object that fits on a small b ook page. The exterior shots have been cut from larger photographs, freed of their backgrounds and printed as if t he blank white of the page were the context for the house. In one image of the side of the house, bare tree branches stretch across the clapboard wall of the structure. In the book, the cut in the house is made by cutting a thin slice out of the photograph, and in this photograph, Matta-Clark is careful to keep the delicate paper branches of the tree intact. Certain rules are adhered to in the construction of this photo world. The photo collages map the interior of the house for the viewer, and the span of the map is dictated by the expanse of the cut. Over the course of the thirtyfour pages, the photo collages grow in complexity — from two photographs joined where the cut crosses the floor of a room to an entire half of the house that is composed of several different photographs joined together. The photograph is at once a flat, thin surface and an illusionistic space. It points to the complex ways viewers read the frame of an image and what it frames. A f rame is b oth a b oundary and a signifier that directs the viewer’s attention and renders what is within something “to be looked at,” while designating what is outside it “something to be ignored.” The manner in which viewers have regarded frames and the images and spaces they enclose/produce has developed over centuries, as Brian O’Doherty argued, and has been dictated by the cultural use to which images have been put. Matta-Clark’s images

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FIGURE

1 . 4 G ordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, collage, 1974. © 2011 Estate of Gordon

Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

present us with three different ways of reading what we are presented with: an image that is read as a windo w; an image that is read as a sur face; and a space presented as a unified object. In an interview for the catalog for Office Baroque, which was made in Antwerp in 1977, Matta-Clark explained, “Why hang things on a wall when the wall itself is s o much more a c hallenging medium? It is t he rigid mentality that architects install the walls and artists decorate them that offends my sense of either profession. A simple cut or series of cuts acts as a powerful drawing device a ble t o r edefine spa tial si tuations a nd str uctural co mponents.”61 Matta-Clark is also talking about his photo-collage pieces in this paragraph and the way that these works break the conventional frame of the photograph and the single-point perspective in which the space of a photographic image is structured. The book represents the movement of a seeing body that can walk on two legs, as i t moves t hrough t he house. We b egin in t he bas ement w here two

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snapshots show us a lo w-ceilinged room that is filled with old clothes and appliances. In one image, an old clothesline jags across the photograph as an old rumpled coat hangs from a wire hanger. It is unclear why these two images are joined where they are until we notice in the background a complete stairway that crosses the two images. It invites us to go upstairs. When t he c ut has b een made in ho use in t he narrative of t he b ook, we move through the house looking up staircases and across rooms to windows where the sunlight streams in t o dusty bare spaces. The line o f the cut that divides each room also dictates how the camera surveys each space. The sole coherent thing in the photo collages is the line of this cut, which jogs across stairs and streaks through the ceilings of rooms, while the rooms themselves tumble around its axis. In the most dramatic example of this, the camera looks up from the bottom of the stairs over the second-floor hallway to the roof. In the lowest picture, the camera is placed on the stairs looking through the banister out the windows of a r oom on the first floor, as t he cut slices acr oss the stairs, the banister, and the ceiling of the first-floor room. The next two pictures, joined by the cut, look up the stairs and at the second floor banister from below, following the line o f the cut through the ceiling and the banister. The next photograph frames the ceiling and an opening in the attic, showing us the cut as it opens to the sky a nd lets in sunlig ht. The cut opens the roof and then widens as it comes down the far wall (which would be on the other side of the camera and invisible). However, t he ca mera r ecords as dis continuous a mo vement t hrough a space that to the eyes is continuous. Because it conforms to the dictates of a flat surface rather than an illusionistic three-dimensional space, the photographic imag e dist orts t he way a n embodied e ye s ees t he space . Time has been infused into this image — the image portrays successive moments as if they were one moment and a space that cannot be grasped at one glance, as if it could be. The photographs try to acknowledge that a vie wer turns and moves her head while staying in the same place. The collages are evocative of the way that Nick Kaye describes the viewer producing the space o f a si tespecific work by performing in it. In these still images and static objects, Matta-Clark nearly captures a sense of durée — the word coined by Henri B ergson. B ergson describes how the process of perception is bound with memory. In memory, the immaterial past

FIGURE

1 . 5 G ordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, collage, 1974.

© 2011 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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expands into the present moment of somatic perception.62 Instead of being a distinct instance of recollection, the process occurs continually. Each moment is divided between the past and the future. The virtual past moment contracts toward the future, and becomes material — a perception in the present. At the same time, the present dilates, is made vir tual, and falls away into the past. Duration is the connection between these two moments, which are held together for a short while before they are differentiated. Memory, according to Gilles Deleuze, is duration. I say that Matta-Clark nearly captures the sense of duration because Bergson claims duration is more accurate than the “cinematographical” or scientific depiction of experience. We could say that the gap between Matta-Clark’s snapshots, the flicker of the images, as in a film, points to th e duration th at w e cannot experien ce a s view ers of s till p hotographs. And Matta-Clark arranged the text in the book as if it were a silent film. Because of the nature of the photographs in Splitting, viewers of these images a nd ob jects a re made a ware o f t he sim ultaneity o f time s cales in t he work. They are given a literal illustration via the collage technique of the difficulty of synthesizing many distinct p erceptions into a me aningful whole. Bergson uses the mundane example of a person waiting for sugar to melt in a glass of water. Waiting bespeaks an expectation that time pass es at a ra te based on one’s own duration, but it comes into direct conflict with the duration of sugar melting. In the impatience of waiting, the people who wait become aware both of their own duration and that of others.63 In Matta-Clark’s entire Splitting project, we become aware that there is t he time s cale of the house and its history, which as Anne Wagner notes, opens up the work to the social context of the site. But there is also the time scale of the cut and, finally, that of the photographs that form a flickering sequence. Bergson claims that one b ecomes aware of duration in t he interaction of multiple rhythms. In Matta-Clark’s work, the synchronic aspect of the work — the mapping of the space — is acknowledged. But so too is t he diachronic in t he movement of the body through the house and the making and eventual disappearance of the w ork in time . The p hotographs capture t he s ense o f de velopment a nd decay that fascinated Matta-Clark in organic processes. The photographic documentation of Matta-Clark’s work, like the catalog for the Rooms exhibition, is constructed as a narrative that tries to interject a sense of time and movement that the still photographs do not have. Narrative structures or sequences seem to be required to compensate for the stillness

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and silence o f the photographs. This points to photography’s connection to language.

The Act of Looking: ___________, Louise Lawler, Adrian Piper and Cindy Sherman Have Agreed to Participate in an Exhibition Organized by Janelle Reiring at Artists Space, September 23 to October 28, 1978 A year after Rosalind Krauss’s second article titled “Notes on the Index” had appeared in October, a group of young artists invited by the gallerist Janelle Reiring pa rticipated in a n exhib ition ti tled ___________, Lo uise La wler, Adrian Piper and Cindy Sherman Have Agreed to Participate in an Exhibition Organized b y J anelle Rei ring a t A rtists S pace, S eptember 23 t o O ctober 28, 1978, at the alternative space Artists Space in Manhattan. In this exhibition, photography replaced language as t he device that presents questions about the frame. Each of the works uses language or refers to a narrative structure. Rather than engaging the viewer as a b ody, the works in this exhibition ask the viewer to interpret texts and to evaluate positions in t he art world. The artists’ works in the exhibition differed starkly from each other, underscoring the conceptual dimension of the theme of the exhibition, which emphasized the way that viewers see and “read” works in an exhibition space. Artists Space o pened in 1972 under t he direction o f Trudie G race a nd Irving Sandler as a space that was devoted to showing the work of young artists t hat had b een chosen by other artists.64 The galler y was o pened at t he intersection of Wooster and Houston Street. In 1975, Helene Winer became the director of Ar tists Space and moved t he galler y to 105 H udson Street. When Winer became director of Artists Space, it marked a change in the direction of the gallery. Winer and the others at Artists Space wanted to give the gallery a clear identity. In an interview with Cindy Sherman, Valerie Smith, and Matt Mullican, Winer said, “I just wanted to set up a situation that would introduce a lot of challenging work. Artists Space took on an identity that a lot of artists wanted to be associated with. Also it was a different time in the art world. It was the beginning of this notion that art could be both visually seductive and conceptually serious.”65 The exhibition initiated by Janelle Reiring the following year represented a careful look at the exhibition space as a political and social frame by using various strategies. Winer asked Reiring to organize a show at Artists Space,

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and Reiring had the idea of an exhibition of artists’ work that “addresses the issue of how art is presented and, in turn, how it is seen.”66 At the time, Reiring was working for Leo Castelli Gallery, but she insists that the idea for the show did not come from her experience working at a gallery but rather from the work of the artists who were in the show. At C astelli, she had met a nd b ecome f riends wi th L ouise L awler, a nd through that friendship met Christopher D’Arcangelo. Reiring describes the contemporary art scene in New York at the time as small and close knit.67 The third participant in the exhibition was Cindy Sherman, who happened to be working at Artists Space at the time. According to Reiring, Sherman would arrive at her job as receptionist without fanfare, dressed in various outfits and disguises. B ased o n t hese sp ontaneous p erformances, Reir ing t hought her work wou ld fit in w ell to t he exhibition. The last pa rticipant was t he b estknown artist, but she was no longer participating in the New York art scene. After making important contributions in co nceptual art, Adrian Piper had gone on to Harvard University to study for a PhD in p hilosophy. Piper had already exhibited in 1974 a t Artists Space with a p erformance and series of photographs with text bubbles titled “Talking to Myself, the Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object.”68 Reiring had s een Piper’s work when she had first come to New York in the early 1970s and liked it. So, she wrote to Piper and asked her to participate in the show.

Between Viewer and Artwork Louise Lawler and Christopher D’Arcangelo shared a large room at 105 Hudson Street; the room had a set of windows that looked out on the façade of the Citibank building across the street. Another set of windows looked into an interior space. Louise Lawler’s untitled piece consisted of a painting that she had borrowed from the New York Racing Association’s Aqueduct Race Track. The painting Black Race Horse depicted a ho rse in p rofile and was pa inted in 1863 by painter Henry Stull.69 Lawler hung the painting so that it partially obscured some of the interior windows in t he exhibition space. Above the painting she in stalled a b right t heater lig ht s o t hat it shone directly at any viewer w ho tr ied to lo ok at t he painting.70 She installed another s o t hat it shone out the windows of Artists Space on Hudson Street onto the façade of the Citibank building across the way.

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In turning t he sp otlight around on t he vie wer and on t he street, L awler made the viewer aware that the act of viewing, who was looking and who was not looking, was as m uch a part of the art as the arrangement itself. Lawler explained her choice this way in the Artists Space anniversary catalog: “In a very corny way, part of the point was to signal that something was going on at Artists Space. I felt it was a very distinct audience of young artists looking at each other’s work; and being on the second floor, nobody in the neighborhood, in w hat wasn’t yet called TriBeCa, was t oo aware of Artists Space.”71 Artists S pace ca tered t o t he co mmunity o f y oung a vant-garde a rtists w ho knew enough t o s ee t he show a nd w ould ne ver st ep f oot in t he galler y of paintings at the Aqueduct Race Track. Lawler planned to highlight the difference between a certain type of art (i.e., traditional naturalistic painting) and the new art being produced at the time. While squinting in the bright light, viewers were made aware that they wanted to see the painting and that, in a certain sense, they were being put on stage and looked at while they were trying to look at the painting. In this way, Lawler sought to raise the selfawareness of her viewers at Artists Space and underlined the social divisions between the audiences of the two exhibition spaces. Christopher D ’Arcangelo p erformed s everal p rocedures t hat p rovided an  anonymous comment on t he exhibition and t he exhibition space i tself. D’Arcangelo removed his name from the show and any announcement about the show. In an interesting way, D’Arcangelo’s act of pulling his na me from the promotion of the show means that his work has been ignored in popular memory o f t his exhib ition, w hich p oints t o t he significance o f t he p hotographs and catalog in constructing our understanding of these exhibitions of installation art. In his piece, four separate sheets of paper were pasted to a small wall that jutted out into the space t hat held L awler’s work. In looking at the painting hung on the wall after looking out the windows, the viewer would discover D’Arcangelo’s work. The Artists Space archives have only a few slides showing the text on the wall. The text, however, appears in the anniversary catalog 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space, and it demonstrates, as L awler attests, t hat she a nd D’Arcangelo had b een t alking about t heir contribution to  the exhib ition. D’Arcangelo’s t ext is di vided into f our pa rts: (1) Ar tists Space: Where Are You and What’s in a Name? (2) Design, Name, Propaganda; (3) Propaganda/Context; and (4) Being in a Public Space. The texts comment

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FIGURE

1 . 6 L ouise Lawler, untitled, 1978. Courtesy of Louise Lawler.

on the significance of Artists Space and its relationship to the viewer but also the exhibition space’s less visible connection to a system of money and “propaganda,” to use the artist’s term, incorporating larger social institutions and finally the capitalist system. The texts appeared on different walls of the space as o ne walked through the exhibition. Louise Lawler has said that D’Arcangelo’s work was to be included in every room of the space.72 Addressing the viewer, they functioned like a narrator to the viewer’s experience of the show. And they encompassed the space as a w hole without interfering with t he other a rtists’ w ork. L ike Lawler’s a rrangement, w hich, ho wever, o perates mo re o n t he le vel o f t he viewer’s exp ectations o f visual a rt, D ’Arcangelo’s t ext in vites t he r eader t o think about what the space is and how it functions: At this time you are in a divided space, Artists Space. Your reason for being here can be one of many, but your being here subjects you to the limitations

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FIGURE

1 . 7 C hristopher D’Arcangelo, untitled, 1978. Courtesy of Louise Lawler.

imposed by design and based on the function of the space. How can you see its function? How can you know its limitations? . . . One could say that the austere design of this place helps to obscure its function. At this point one must be careful, for all this austerity can show the function of the space when it is connected with the idea that an object alone is more visible than an object in a group. Thus the design of Artists Space shows us one aspect of its function: to help us see (better) the objects placed in the space.73

This is an excerpt from D’Arcangelo’s first section of text, but by the third the anonymous interlocutor has a rgued that in fac t one of the functions of Artists Space is t o obscure its connections to broader networks of government and corporate funding. Thus, the purpose of Artists Space, the anonymous text tells the viewer, is to highlight some aspects of Artists Space and distract attention from others in a conceptual act of spotlighting that parallels Lawler’s own. The final block of text brings the specificity of the work in time and place to the viewer’s attention. It questions the art content of the text blocks themselves and t hen goes on t o explain how t he work was made: “ The process used to install t his work on t he wall was t he s ame process as t hat us ed to

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make the printing plate for the announcement and catalog for this exhibition. . . . Three copies of this work were made. The typeset and negative were destroyed at the time that the work was exposed.” In this way, the text points to not only its own production but also its circumscription and destruction, as a site-specific installation. Adrian Piper installed a piece in a small alcove at Artists Space that combined sound and images. The work was located in a room separated from the other pieces that a viewer was required to enter. Upon turning a corner, the viewer was greeted by an image depicting black South Africans descending a staircase. The photograph was printed at 30 by 30 inches and positioned so that viewers felt as if they were located in a space lower than the figures in the photograph. The a rtist intended t he enco unter t o b e co nfrontational o r at least puzzling. The taped voice begins by telling viewers what they (the viewers) want: “It doesn’t matter who these people are. They’re parts of a piece of art, which is part of an art exhibit, in an art gallery, in Soho, in New York City. This gallery is o ne of the best: progressive, daring, shows some of the most interesting and aesthetically innovative work around. You expect, and hope, that when you leave this gallery, your conception of what art can be will be altered, maybe even expanded, if o nly by the smallest f raction.”74 Later, the voice goes on to say, In looking at this picture, you carefully monitor any subliminal or undisciplined reactions you have to this image of assertive aggressive, angry-looking blacks; they might be a part of the piece. In fact, all your reactions, all your thoughts about what you’re now experiencing might be part of this piece. In this space, in this gallery, in front of this picture, you don’t want to let your politics interfere with or deaden your aesthetic perceptions, but rather contribute to them: your political reactions are part of the art experience you are trying to have.

Like Lawler and D’Arcangelo’s works, Piper makes the viewer aware of her act of looking, her a ttempt to read the image. And lik e L awler’s work, this self-awareness comes about in part because of the way the artist has arranged the material in the space and her use of language as a framing device. A photograph does not have intrinsic meaning. Allan Sekula describes the photograph as something that is always snatched up by a motivated discourse. The process of critique proceeds by discovering the historical discourse by which

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the photograph was snatched and analyzing its politics and their manifestation in readings of the image. Piper’s piece responds to other images of people of color. In an analysis of nineteenth-century anthropological photographs taken of people in Af rica, anthropologist Gwyn Prins p oints to t he way photographs are read differently by various audiences. Although a photograph may depict individuals in a way that within their own culture signifies dignity, in Western cultural contexts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the image will b e read in a different way.75 For instance, the scientific discourse steers viewers’ readings of an image. They describe one photograph in which the individual does not look at the camera, which has been placed on a stand. The viewers see a profile of the individual, evincing a sense of distance between the viewer and the object of t he camera gaze. The sur veying p osition of t he camera amplifies subjects’ lack of engagement with the photographer. Circulating in a Western scientific context, the photograph might be read as a typ e or “a specimen,” according to Prins. As work from the 1970s on documentary photography argued, the documentary photograph underwrites and supports whatever reading is given to it by the discourse into which it is inco rporated.76 The photograph, in g eneral, because of its portable, fragmentary nature, objectifies the subject depicted. The photograph is considered “evidence” because it is assumed to be objective, transparent, and an index. The invisibility of the photographer, the camera, and the viewer underscores that the viewer should read the photograph as objective. Piper’s work puts viewers in the position to question the way they read the image in her p iece by using language to address the viewers. Piper has described her a pproach els ewhere as “ the indexical p resent,” w hich is a n a ttempt to provoke the viewer’s defensive reactions to images and then draw the viewer’s attention to that defensive reaction or discomfort. In reflecting on this discomfort and transforming it into language, the artist hopes, viewers become aware of the rigid, stereotypical categories that they use to process encounters such as this. Piper’s work draws attention, as Roland Barthes argues that a critical reading of photographs should, to the ways in which viewers’ cultural lexica condition their reading of photographic images in particular. By making it difficult to look at without thinking, Piper’s piece defies the expectations that one

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carries to a traditional gallery space. Piper chose an image in which the subject looks directly at the camera, and she made i t large enough that the figures depicted look down from a height at viewers. She then supplies an authoritative voice that insists that viewers pay attention to their responses to the image. Rather than offering up images of these black men to the viewer’s gaze, the encounter borders on a confrontation that the viewer must contemplate. Janelle Reiring had invited Sherman to exhibit because of her performance on the job at Artists Space, but Sherman instead exhibited her film stills for the first time. The film stills also drew on the ability of viewers to read cultural codes but challenged the viewer more obliquely. The Sherman images were hung along a corridor. As recorded in one of the images in the Artists Space archives, the film stills that Sherman showed have become well known. These included the image of the starlet with a dark, beehive hairdo and sunglasses, leaning out a sun-drenched patio door in a dr unken manner (“Untitled Film Still #7”) and the model, lying on a bed, robe thrown open to show her dressed in a bra and panties (“Untitled Film Still #6”). These prints were hung on the wall in a traditional manner: one after the other. They were large and t acked unf ramed t o t he wall o f t he galler y. S ome co mmentators have noted that it is necessary to see Sherman’s pieces one after another, in order to understand her work of dress up and play act, by comparing one image to the next. The images are traps that catch viewers in t he act of looking and categorizing, by coaxing viewers to draw on their knowledge of visual codes acquired via t he mass media. I n the process, viewers realize that the figure in the photograph has become an object of the gaze and the subject of a sexist cultural discourse. Reiring noted that the responses to the show were varied but that Sherman’s pieces were an immediate hit. People, however, were more puzzled by the other artists’ work. Lawler has indicated that the audience for the show was the usual art audience with a lot of young artists interested in looking at other young artists’ work.77 Although the artists knew the audience that was going to see the work, the intention of the work did not always convey clearly to viewers.78 An example of this is April Kingsley’s review of the show for the Village Voice. Adrian Piper is the only artist who stands out in the show, according to the review. Kingsley complains that artists’ works spill into each other’s spaces, and that, combined with the anonymity of some of the artists, makes it difficult to determine the limits and authorship of each piece. She

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cites t he influences of artists, such as H ans Haacke, Joseph Kosuth, R afael Ferrer, Michael Asher, and even Marcel Duchamp. She goes further in complaining about the lack of clear authorial integrity by asserting that “one of the artists s eems embarrassingly derivative of the early work of another.”79 What the Kingsley review seems to miss is the site-specific aspect of the exhibition and the work in it. As such, the context and content of the work derives not so much from the careers and oeuvres of the individual artists but rather from the encounter with these works of art in this particular space. One of the interesting aspects of the exhibition is that it was so spare. Ther e was very little for the viewer to look at but the blank walls of the exhibition space. If we think about this in terms of framing the exhibition space and compare, for instance, Louise Lawler’s work to Christopher D’Arcangelo’s, it is easy to s ee t hat t he significance of L awler’s maneuvers was mo re ambiguous — D’Arcangelo’s less so because he used text. And it is the textual aspect of the work that returns us to Krauss’s comments about the function of the frame in the photograph. In her essay “Notes on the Index,” Krauss argues that the framing that takes place in the photograph — or, I w ould add , t he in stallation — brings t he p resence o f t he b uilding t o t he viewer’s attention and renders that framed portion significant but ambiguous. A supplementary text is r equired, a ca ption of some sort. And, rather than photographs, the materials that provide the most information about this exhibition thirty years on are the texts and narratives about the exhibition.

The Catalog The catalog for the show is equally spare; the photographs are few, and there are no installation shots. Instead, language replaces the photographs. The catalog has tw enty pages with a b lack paper cover sized 9.5 b y 8 inc hes and a logo designed b y L awler o f a w hite A, wi th “Artists Space” p rinted o n t he cross-bar, placed within a circle. The pages were shared out to the organizer and artists. Reiring contributed a text explaining the genesis of the exhibition. D’Arcangelo’s section consists of blank pages, and Lawler’s points to the cover as her design. P iper’s pages begin with the question “What is t he aesthetic content of this work?” Then it shows a detail of the photograph and gives its origin as National Geographic magazine. The next tw o pages give the complete text of the audio component of the piece. The catalog concludes with

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four reproductions of Sherman’s photographs. The catalog gives no c lue as to the layout of the space, as the Rooms catalog did, and even more it leaves Lawler’s and D’Arcangelo’s works a mystery. The spare catalog suggests a few things. First, it is clear that Artists Space’s budget was no t lavish a nd t he catalog designer s a nd a rtists did w hat t hey could to adapt to these circumstances. Second, the engagement of the viewer’s b ody is do wnplayed in t he exhib ition. L awler s ays t hat she p roduced black-and-white press photographs of her work and that each was a detail of the work, underlining the sense that the work included not just the actual arrangement by Lawler but also the social context of the work.80 The specific, material qualities of the space ma tter less t han its position within a field of exhibition spaces a nd the social context of the art world. Language is w hat directs the viewer’s attention to these aspects of the exhibition and the work of the artists who participated. We have at least two examples in w hich dialog b etween the work (or the artist) and the viewer was established: Adrian Piper’s sound installation and D’Arcangelo’s text. In Lawler’s, the pull of language is more subtle. Her piece performs the basic procedure of a syst em of meaning: it demonstrates difference. In other words, Lawler presents us with the opportunity to compare the difference between the painting and the space in which it has been hung. Furthermore, t he difference b etween the commonplace conventions of the traditional or modernist gallery space and the exhibition situation presented at Artists Space is r evealed by viewers’ frustrated desire to see the painting obscured by the spotlight shining in their eyes. Cindy Sherman’s work, of course, points to a narrative structure of which each indi vidual imag e is a pa rt. D ouglas Cr imp p resented t his r eading o f Sherman’s work in the essay written about an exhibition he organized at Artists Space the year previous. Sherman did not participate in this exhibition, titled Pictures, which took place in the fall of 1977, but she is f orever associated with it b ecause of t he revised v ersion of Cr imp’s ess ay, w hich later appeared in October, included an image and discussion of Sherman’s work absent in t he o riginal t ext.81 The sho w ac tually inc luded w ork b y Rob ert Longo, Sherrie Levine, Jack Goldstein, Troy Brauntuch, and Philip Smith. Pictures was a n exhib ition in w hich t he a rtists a nd t he c urator had a bsorbed ideas about the nature of photography presented in Walter Benjamin’s writings. Echoing the end of Rosalind Krauss’s second “Notes on the Index”

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essay, which draws from Benjamin and Barthes, Crimp argues that the films and photographs in t he show were f ragments of a na rrative. Cr imp’s ess ay argued for the emergence of a new kind of art that played with the ambivalent nature of the photograph. The photograph is a kind o f presence while at the same time being the physical manifestation of the absence of the thing it dep icts. I n K rauss’s a rgument t he dir ect p resentation o f a p hotographic image, the body of an old school building, or the cut-out section of an old tenement floor, begs for a supplementary text. This insight derives from Walter Benjamin’s assertion that a photograph requires a caption in order to be read. Derrida argues something similar with reference to the parergon, the frame: “What constitutes them as parerga is not simply their exteriority as a surplus, it is the internal structural link which rivets them to the lack in the interior of the ergon. And this lack would be constitutive of the very unity of the ergon.”82 Both photography and language serve to frame site-specific installation in t he 1970s. I t is in stallation that draws the viewer’s attention to the frame of the work in the form of the exhibition space and in the form of the procedures of the art institution that render the work a legitimate aspect of art practice. Within t he examples of installation art I ha ve dis cussed, t here s eems to be a group of works that can be effectively photographed and another group that cannot be photographed. Those works that cannot be effectively photographed emphasize the viewer’s experience and sense in real time. Thes e works point bac k t o t he vie wer a nd f ocus o n t he indi vidual in ternal exp erience. Those works amenable to photography and that use language point outward, focusing o n co ntext a nd, as a r esult, o ften cr itique a rt w orld ideo logy. A s such, the work in the Artists Space exhibition refuses to be autonomous and remains dependent on its particular place and time; this work draws on photography and language as a tool to critique the art practice in a particular site. Hence, even in this exhibition, a couple of years after the Rooms exhibition, site-specificity has been revealed to have another dimension.

The Frames of Installations In t he exa mples o f in stallation a rt dis cussed in t his c hapter, t he no tion o f the  relationship b etween t he w ork a nd t he f rame — ergon and parergon — the documentary photograph, and the installation has proved quite variable.

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Rooms showed the variety of ways artists used the old school space as a kind of frame for their installations. In comparing the variety of ways that artists interpreted the relationship between their works and the spaces t hey were in, it is possible to see that the installations ranged from those in which the building sur faces o r dis appears in r elation t o t he w ork t o t hose in w hich the building surface is part of the work. It might be well at this point to return to a nother pass age f rom D errida’s The Truth in P ainting: “ Parerga ha ve a thickness, a sur face which separates them not only (as K ant would have it) from the integral side, from the body proper of the ergon, but also from the outside, from the wall on which the painting is hung, from the space in which statue or column is erected.”83 Brian O’Doherty noted that the flat surface of abstract, modernist painting had placed pressure on the frame and in t urn brought the wall o n which it was hung into play as part of the art. I argue that the Rooms exhibition demonstrates how flexibly the exhibition space functions as a frame for the work. In more site-specific pieces, such as Richard Serra’s trench in t he attic or in Gordon M atta-Clark’s w ork, t he wall was t hinned until i t f olded into t he material of the work itself. But the wall could also be thickened, as in Dennis Oppenheim’s work, until it disappears altogether f rom the viewer’s field of attention and becomes just support for a work, which functions more like a traditional naturalistic painting in relation to its frame. In Gordon Matta-Clark’s cuts, the cut itself is a kind of frame that not only points to the immediate object-quality of the house, room, or warehouse but also sets off the durational aspect of the site itself, highlighting the way the structure has changed over time and pointing inward to the temporary quality of Matta-Clark’s own short-lived interventions. These arcs of development and decay are made concrete in Matta-Clark’s photographs and books, which are presented as sequences. The work at Artists Space differs from the previous examples. As in Rooms and Matta-Clark’s works, the works in the exhibition point to the immediate conditions of the space. However, these artists are focusing on not the work’s relationship to the exhibition space as a material limit to the work but rather the significance of the space as an institution in the art scene of the time. And as Janelle Reiring points out, the gesture, except for Cindy Sherman’s work, was confusing t o vie wers. In contrast t o t he Rooms exhibition, t hey didn’t quite know what to make of it. And perhaps this lack of communication has

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to do with the fact that viewers, such as Nancy Foote, were able to fit the work in the Room exhibition into the familiar language of postminimal, conceptual, and p erformance art. The Ar tists Space exhibition represented s omething new. In pointing to the wall o f the exhibition space, the artists in t he Artists S pace exhib ition w ere als o p ointing b eyond t o t he immediate su pporting systems of the art market, museum, mass media, a nd art history of the late 1970s, which is regarded by viewers as exterior to the progressive and uncompromised al ternative a rt space . “ Parerga have a t hickness, a sur face which separates them not only (as Kant would have it) from the integral side, from the body proper of the ergon, but also from the outside, from the wall on which the painting is hung, from the space in w hich statue or column is erected, then, step by step, from the whole field of historical, economic, political inscription in which the drive to signature is produced” (emphasis mine).84 One of the aspects of the Artists Space exhibition that distinguishes it from the Rooms exhibition at PS1 is how dispersed the elements of the show were. The artists pointed always to systems and media beyond the exhibition space itself. Chr istopher D ’Arcangelo did s o b y r emoving a ny ad vertisement o f his work or name beyond the confines of the galler y space. L awler, on the other hand, created a succinct but ambiguous logo that was printed on 81/2 by 11 inch paper and posted in various locations in Lower Manhattan. Piper and Sherman’s work points to social practices in looking as well as the social conventions that condition understandings of race and gender that pervade the exhibition space and the world outside. In this way, we can say that the works in t he Ar tists S pace show f unction lik e p hotographs in t heir sp ecificity in relation to time (in hist ory) and place (material and social context), as well as their need for supplementary texts. Unlike in the Rooms exhibition or in Matta-Clark’s Splitting, these artists relied on not photographs to frame their work within the context of the art world but rather language.

The Historical Impact of Catalogs as Photographic Archives The catalogs, photographs, and texts are supplements that frame these works and exhibitions. We can consider them archives of a sort, and their rules guide how we read and understand and remember these exhibitions. The Rooms catalog substitutes for the pieces in the exhibition and they were removed and, in some cases, destroyed when the exhibition was over. The catalog system-

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atically mapped the show via photographs, floor plans, and viewers’ personal experiences. The photographs in the publication are treated as simple documentary images that have been arranged in b ook format in t he same order that one might walk through the exhibition, providing a persuasive substitute for the experience itself. The text that seems to have defined the exhibition the most in the context of art history, however, is Krauss’s “Notes on the Index, Part 2,” which focuses on only a few site-specific pieces in the show in order to make the claim that art of the 1970s differs from that of the 1960s. For instance, Krauss chose an earlier piece by Dennis Oppenheim titled Identity Stretch that was si te specific and depended on photographic documentation. She included this piece rather than the more figurative and theatrical piece he made f or the Rooms exhibition titled Broken Record Blues. As a result of Krauss’s choices, the great variety of ways t hat artists in t his show interpreted t he installation format and context of the old school building as a frame has been overlooked in art history. Matta-Clark’s photographs shape how we understand his work and substitute for the now-lost buildings and cuts. The photographs bridge the lack that has b een p roduced b y t he pass age o f time , s erving as r ough o utlines f or something one can no longer experience. They approximate the bodily experience of his altered spaces while remaining in themselves complex studies of the way that the frame of the photograph shapes visual spaces. In their partiality and insufficiency, the photographs serve as markers for the passage of time, marking the distance between the current viewer and the disappeared work. The works in the Artists Space show differ once again from the two previous examples in that the photographic documentation is quite minimal and little published. The catalog includes very few images but at least two texts. The same is tr ue of the archival material at Artists Space that has remained from the show. Christopher D’Arcangelo refused to have his name circulate outside the exhibition space in p ress releases or the catalog. For this reason and because of his unf ortunate early death, he t ends to be forgotten in t his exhibition. L awler, P iper, a nd esp ecially Cind y S herman a re r emembered in this exhibition because their works either outlasted the show (in the case of Piper and Sherman) or were documented by photographs. The works focused viewers’ attention on their participation in or exclusion from broader

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structures and s ocial practices in t he art world. The artists chose to draw viewers’ attention to the specificity of their placement in a social context at a particular time (this dimension of site-specificity) primarily via language. Especially b ecause it is a ub iquitous art practice, it is im portant t o pay attention to the way works of installation art manipulate the notion of the frame. L ike a p hotograph, installation always calls f or a su pplement, s ome kind of frame within the context of the art world, even as it may deny its need for a frame. This need for a supplement, as Derrida would say, points to a lack of a secure identity. Installation art can have an ever-expanding set of frames, ranging from the literal space and time in which it has been made to the less immediate ideological structures that lend it meaning. Much of the writing on installation art has noted this aspect of it. However, these ideological and discursive structures can include not only the literal exhibition space but also the photographs and texts that populate exhibition catalogs of installation art: the archives of these works. These images and documents, even if t hey are considered su pplementary t o t he w ork, co ntinue t o co ndition o ur under standing of the work in important ways. The next chapter describes the work of Renée Green whose pieces focus on the issue of framing and the archive and asks the viewer to question how the way photographs are hung, arranged, and framed affects our understanding of history and memory. Green’s work takes the historical photographic archive and renders it something that we must read and criticize.

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the politics of representation ARCHIVE AND MEMORY IN THE WORK OF RENÉE GREEN

Photography in Site-Specific Installation Art Fragments and ephemera from the past are gathered in an installation. Small pieces of crumbly concrete are arranged under a g lass vitrine that is s et on a simple white table along with a map and some paperback books. Music of the 1970s p lays on a boom box, and black-and-white photographs of 1970s protesters are hung on the walls (figure 2.1).1 Videotapes play on monitors alongside a co llection of vinyl albums and a t urntable. The narrator of one video relates the following event: The girl watched the news and waited anxiously, often. That’s part of what she recollects of childhood. Waiting. Seeing the running text of news reporting students shot at Kent State moving across the bottom of the t v screen. t v programs were interrupted and her mother was late returning home from there. Across the street, kids played Jackson 5 45s and Sly Stone. The girl smoothed her bedspread and checked for order. Finally her mother did arrive, but she can’t remember now what either said. It was May 4th, 1970. (Video transcript, Partially Buried)

The girl’s memory recounted in the film Partially Buried is the artist’s memory, which is then dispersed into the broader collection of objects and recordings that constitute the installation Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts produced in 1996–1997. These v estiges o f t he 1970s a re all co nnected wi th Rob ert Smithson’s site-specific earthwork Partially Buried Woodshed and the shooting of student protesters at Kent State University in 1970. In this piece, Green examines t he co nnections b etween p ersonal memo ry, p hotographs, do cu-

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ments, and artifacts. This is a work of installation art that takes as part of its subject matter the documentation of a previous work of site-specific art and the historical context of which it is a part. Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts asks questions about documentation and its relationship to memory and history. This chapter argues t hat, in ma ny of Renée G reen’s pieces, she us es t he arrangement a nd exa mination of p hotographs a nd p hotographic media as a way of addressing issues of history and memory through the format of the archive. G reen’s w ork co nnects t o co nceptual a rt in t he 1960s a nd 1970s, which utilized serial structures and was interested in scrutinizing systems of representation and language. It is already well established that Robert Smithson’s work is a precedent for site-specific installation art such as Green’s, but one could include as well Marcel Broodthaers’s and John Baldessari’s work as well. The artists who were included in t he Artists Space exhibition, such as Adrian Piper, Chr istopher D’Arcangelo, and L ouise L awler, are als o precedents for this type of work in installation art in that they ask the viewer to be active readers of the work and its situation. Green’s archival practice brings together issues o f photography and sitespecificity.2 Analog photographs bear the touch of light and shadow available at a particular time and in a particular place. Photography has a specificity to it that, as we have seen, connects it to those site-specific installations built in place in spaces a nd str uctures, suc h as PS1 o r G ordon M atta-Clark’s o ld house. Like these works, the photograph is an index. In the writings of Roland Barthes, Allan Sekula, and Martha Rosler, the photograph is r evealed, however, to be not just a sim ple document or index b ut also a co mplex of cultural codes and beliefs. Roland Barthes helped develop this more nuanced understanding of photography by considering the image from the perspective of the person who looked at it. Barthes tried to determine how the viewer would g o a bout under standing t he imag e. I n his c hapter “ Rhetoric o f t he Image,” Barthes teased out the various messages in a photograph and argued that viewers of photographs are in fact readers of images. Hal Foster linked works interested in “ site” beginning in t he 1960s wi th Minimalism: These developments constitute a sequence of investigations: first of the material constituents of the art medium, then of the spatial conditions of perception, and then of the corporeal bases of this perception — shifts marked

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in Minimalist art in the early 1960s through conceptual, performance, body, and site-specific art in the early 1970s. Soon the institution of art could no longer be described only in spatial terms . . . it was also a discursive network of different practices and institutions, other subjectivities and communities.3

As wi th t he under standing o f t he p hotograph, t he definition of s itespecificity has become more complicated. In the last twenty years, as I noted in t he introduction, art historians such as M iwon Kwon and James Meyer have a rgued t hat si tes a re no t sim ply ma terial co nfigurations b ut ca n b e embedded in language or woven out of the relationships established among people, objects, places, and disciplines. Green has been seen as one of a generation of artists w ho helped to redefine site. Her installations are not site specific in t he sense of being built at their place of exhibition and then dismantled once the exhibition is over. Their relation to a site, according to critics such as Kwon and Meyer, occurs as content. While the writing on site-specific art has considered the structure of individual works and the social ramifications of the pieces, the viewer’s relationship to these complex pieces has not been carefully considered. To simplify an argument made by Krauss, medium is defined in terms of the relationship between the viewer and the object.4 This chapter argues that viewers engage with these site-specific works of installation art by reading them. The work gets viewers interested in t he way they read and the way they make sense of the material world, asking them to pay attention to syntax, as in a photographic sequence, and to reflect on the way meaning is produced by the way things are framed and arranged. These arrangements have social and political ramifications. Green’s work is an example of installation art that positions the viewer as a cr itical reader who must decode the meaning of images and objects within their context. The memory showcased in the installation art of this sort is a materialized form of memory, b ound to objects, do cuments, and photographic images. The installations are designed and the images arranged to engage the viewer in this critical reflection on photography, history, and memory. Green’s works might be seen as engaging in t he politics of representation, or perhaps the representation of a certain kind of politics. In her work, photographic practices and their ways of framing the world and producing orders of meaning form the underlying structure of the installations and the films.

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Green’s works tend to persist in various forms after their initial exhibition, and hence, there is less em phasis on the importance of the documentation of  her work. Instead, Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts b egins with questions about the documentation of a site-specific work: Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried. As the narrator says in the videotape Partially Buried Continued, “She wanted to probe the force of photographs and the ways they were bound to the specificity of time, light, and materiality, yet were more than that.” This means too t hat, rather t han b eing p ositioned outside t he installation in a photographic archive that documents the installation, Green’s work contains a photographic archive. The art historian Benjamin Buchloh has examined photographic archives, comparing pre–World War i i examples of artistic photographic archives to those that were made after the war. Using the examples of Aby Warburg and Dada artists, and those associated with the Russian avant-garde, he c laims that these prewar examples were based on the avant-garde principle of collage, montage, and shock. The juxtaposition of images from different contexts produces an estranging effect for viewers, causing them to see the images in a new way. Postwar photographic practice, by contrast, is based on an archival and serial structure. This format has i ts origins in a co unter-model that developed in the 1920s in Europe. “It was photography’s ability to record serially and to present contextual and contingent information. In other words, photography could not only reproduce an almost unlimited number of individuals and objects, but, in addition, could convey an infinite number of different aspects of the same subject.”5 The archive format represented a b elief in the truth of the photographic image that the collage format had, by contrast, invited the viewer to question. The p ostwar format was a r esponse to consumer culture and had a t endency toward anti-aestheticism. Buchloh uses as his examples Marcel Broodthaers, Gerhard Richter, and especially, Bernd and Hilla Becher. Each artist’s work as archive reveals something different. For Richter, it is the rise of consumer culture in conjunction with the proliferation of photographs produced by both professionals and amateurs. In the Bechers’ work, it is t he sense of melancholy attached to t he decline of industrialization, w hich at t he s ame time su ppresses t he co nnection b etween ind ustry a nd t he H olocaust, t he bomb, and other historical traumas. For Broodthaers’s archives, it is the memory of myths and the revival of a kind of historical consciousness.6 Based on

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a serial structure, these collections are uninflected, straightforward presentations of material — seemingly offering no clear opinions or referring in any way back to the subjectivity of the artist. Buchloh’s argument suggests that these p ostwar archival practices result in b oth collective memory and forgetting. In “An Archival Impulse,” Hal Foster argues that a different set of motivations can be found in the work of contemporary artists who use installation as the format of their archives. Foster describes the works of Tho mas Hirschhorn, Sam Durant, and Tacita Dean as a rchival.7 However, he no tes, rather than following a careful and systematic approach to their archival practice as we can see in the postwar work described by Buchloh, these artists are “idiosyncratic” and are drawn to unusual moments and failures in history. Or the works ca n celeb rate wi thout ir ony va rious unlik ely her oes a nd her oines. These artists, Foster argues, seek to make history “physically present.” He also distinguishes these artists from the artists-as-curators and from those who work to critique a t otalizing system or even artists who conceive of the archive as a kind of database. Instead, these artists seek to build something new from r uins. Foster distinguishes t hese artists f rom t hose t hat Buchloh discusses by noting that these artists utilize a sense of affect and involve themselves personally in t he narratives that their works address. The artists who do this kind of work are making small alternative archives. Green, too, is building something from a ruin in Partially Buried in Thre e Parts. Green’s work contradicts the historical order that Buchloh proposes in his chapter because the works that she produces utilize both a collage strategy and a s erial strategy. Photographs, photographic series, photo archives, films, and digital databases constitute these installations. But Green’s works break do wn t he hiera rchy o f t hese syst ems o f o rder. Her in stallations a nd online works allow us to see that each photograph and the object are at the meeting p lace of multiple connections. These objects fall in to many categories at once, and it is t he viewer’s work to discover these categories and connections. In Green’s installations, the viewer is invited to explore the way the meanings of imag es a nd ob jects shift in t he context of filmic a nd p hotographic sequences a nd a rrangements. The in stallations a re s ometimes centered o n the individual experience of Renée Green, the African American artist who has a specific identity and history, but they are also simply collections of in-

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formation. Her memories and experiences are organized indifferently as lists and indexes, but they can also have a narrative structure that guides the viewer’s interactions with the materials the artist has ga thered. She manages to produce an archive that includes, or at least can be read, as expressing an artistic sub jectivity. In t his way, her w ork r esembles mo re t hat o f t he a rtists discussed by Hal Foster, and in fact, both Sam Durant and Tacita Dean, like Green, have made works about the legacy of Robert Smithson. Green’s work too can be seen as a kind alternative archive, pointing up a series of connections between people, places, and events that have not been recorded in the history books. However, Green’s work is closer to a database structure — something Foster excludes in his a nalysis of the archival impulse. New media theorist Lev Manovich has focused on the user interface in his discussion of digital databases, and it provides a way to describe how the viewer interacts with Green’s work. The interface between a computer user and the information that the computer contains takes two forms: as a database — a digital archive — and a three-dimensional space that a computer user must navigate.8 The process of negotiating this space is a linear, potentially narrative structure. Green’s w ork als o o perates as b oth na rrative a nd da tabase. I n G reen’s pieces, syntax is co nnected to narrative, which becomes the means for exploring complicated collections of information and is t he me ans by w hich she asks her vie wers to be critical readers. Green applies this strategy in the context of her videotapes, which, like her installations, are collections of information, artifacts, and materials as well as stories like the one related at the beginning of this chapter. Green’s work is distinc t among archival installations in t he way it is concerned with the involvement of the viewer in t he process of reading and in the process of research in the piece.

Archives Renée Green is interested in how information is organized and evaluated in the context of systems of knowledge and memory. This may be because of her background and training: She did no t receive a degr ee in fine arts but rather one in lib eral arts and was t hen trained in t he publishing industry. Green attended the School of the Visual Arts in New York but graduated from

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Wesleyan University in 1981 a nd trained as a p ublishing intern under t he auspices of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. She then attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1989–1990. 9 Green’s work in the 1990s consisted of projects in which she exhibited the research materials she ga thered in her tra vels and work. Green’s practice of including reflection on her travels as an artist connects her to other traveling artists who chronicled their trips in various ways, such as Robert Smithson.10 Green’s series and sequences of photographs and slides in her in stallations and films suggest Robert Smithson’s Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan. Smithson traveled t o t he Yucatan Peninsula in M exico t o s everal different sites where he placed mirrors in the earth, in sand, and on the trunks of vinecovered trees; took photographs of these pieces; and then dismantled them. We le arn of t hese mir ror displacements t hrough a tra velogue he wr ote to accompany t he photographs. These nonsites, as S mithson called t hem, are able to circulate through art magazines, exhib itions, and catalogs while the site is submerged in the Mexican landscape. Combined with Smithson’s text, the photographs point back to something that no longer exists. The text and photographs s erve as b oth an er ratic archive and a na rrative of t he travel. Green’s work is similar to this piece in many ways. Green’s Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts (1996–1997) explores the way history a nd memory a re constructed in t he a rchival str ucture in a w ork t hat seeks to piece together a vanished period of time, the year 1970. When Robert Smithson had made his si te-specific piece Partially Buried Woodshed at Kent State University that year, Green’s mother began attending a workshop in experimental music at the university. Intrigued by this personal connection to Smithson, the adult Green went back to Kent State to find the remains of the woodshed and to discover any other connections she may have forgotten. Her access to this time period comes in the form of materials — images, books, stories, objects, and films. These are the materials presented in her installation. Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts as it appeared at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in 2000 t ook u p t hree r ooms. The first inc luded G reen’s p hotographs a nd those from the nonfiction book Kent State by James Michener, which Green had re-photographed, framed, and hung on the walls. A trio of three lithographs of the philosopher and political activist Angela Davis hung on a third wall, while a p oster referring to the work’s original exhibition at Pat Hearn

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F I G U R E 2 . 1 R enée Green, Partially Buried in Three Parts, 1996–1997. S ecession, Vienna. Photograph by Matthias Herrmann. Courtesy of the artist and Free Agent Media.

Gallery in New York was hung on another. A boom box played music from the 1970s. At the entrance, Green set a table displaying Michener’s other fiction books, debris from the woodshed, and an aerial map. In the second room, Green conjured the atmosphere of the 1970s in t he form of a co mfortable and fashionable lounging area. The room included a mock-up o f t he s et o f t he do cumentary Underground, t he 1975 film produced by Haskell Wexler, Mary Lampson, and Emile de An tonio about the then fugitive political radicals the Weathermen. An afghan blanket decorated with the phrase “The Future Will Be What the People Struggle to Make It”

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hung on the wall above a mirror and behind a semicircular, brown velveteen chair. The r oom als o f eatured p eriod-style, mass-p roduced, met al t ubular chairs and tables, a macra mé wall ha nging, single-channel video mo nitors, and a listening station with a record player and a collection of albums from the 1970s. The order and sequence of objects and images in the installation was significant. The placement of photographs next t o one another or books near other objects det ermined how one read t he images and objects. And , as a result, the viewer came to question the order and status of photographs and objects in Green’s installations. In the first room of Green’s Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts, photographs from Michener’s book Kent State and Green’s color images confronted each other on opposite walls. They were an abbreviated version of a photographic archive. Hung in a straight line, the Kent State images were press photographs that appeared in various publications at the time. The straight line suggested a chronological ordering, but Green disrupted the chronological sequence found in the book and changed their order at different exhibition sites. Green’s photographs, hung in st aggered rows, were all saturated Cibachromes and depicted her at various sites around the campus of Kent State looking for the remains of the woodshed. The pictures were framed elegantly with mats, as fine art prints, in co ntrast to the unmatted Kent State photographs whose frames cropped the images. The differences between the photographs seem to point to the difference between t heir r espective time p eriods a nd ini tial f unctions. G reen’s p rints have t he lo ok, ha nging, a nd f raming of contemporary fine a rt imag es. Intended to be aesthetically appealing, they play the role of “art photographs.” The press photographs — gray, grainy, and lacking mats — signal “neutral” documents with all the weight of natural fact and would seem to belong in an archive. The photograph as index is seen to be a product of culture that eludes the distorting effects of the rhetorical intentions of language or art. As Allan Sekula des cribes it, t his p erception of t he photograph gives it “a primitive core of meaning, devoid of all cultural determination.”11

Photograph as Fragment in a Series In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault describes the relationship between “document” and “monument.” History that is “memory” seeks to be

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F I G U R E 2 . 2 R enée Green, Partially Buried in Three Parts, 1996–1997. S ecession, Vienna. Photograph by Matthias Herrmann. Courtesy of the artist and Free Agent Media.

straightforward and truthful and to establish continuity from one point in history to the next. This history “undertook to ‘memorize’ the monuments of the past, tra nsform t hem into do cuments, and lend sp eech to t hose traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal.”12 In other words, history as memory a ttempted t o co nnect mo numents a nd a rtifacts in to c lear, co ntinuous narratives. Therefore, Foucault implies, in memo ry, t he monuments of t he past, which have no mo ral meaning or educational function in t hemselves, are enlisted in support of these functions. Archaeology, on the other hand, as a discipline, is a ble to describe monuments but without placing the objects within a historical narrative or totality. The “document,” in this sense, is something that is a nalyzed, articulated, and dispersed among various categories. Foucault’s first definition treats the document as a trace t hat must be revivified by the historian and then enlisted for the sake of a moral cause or historical account.13 The second, aligned with archaeology, treats the document as an already dispersed object, analyzed and divided into many different categories.

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The photograph can participate in both kinds of historical production in an archive. Green’s photographic arrangement can be considered in terms of this relationship between document and memory. The proliferation of institutions to collect, document, catalog, and preserve objects a nd inf ormation in t he ninet eenth a nd tw entieth cen turies distinguish mo dern culture f rom traditional cultures.14 The photograph was a nother way to collect information. It served multiple purposes and eluded strict categorization from its earliest days. In early assessments of photography, enthusiasts of the period, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, exult in the camera’s ability to go to places that the viewer may never see in person and to discover images invisible to the naked eye “in the compressed or expanded reaches of clock-time,” as the filmmaker and critic Hollis Frampton puts it. One could explore a mo ment o f time as o ne w ould exp lore a space . Pho tographerexplorers of time suc h as E adweard Muybridge took t he moment as t heir field of study. Frampton notes, “In much of its early history still photography might be seen as art trying to purge itself of temporality. The snapshot is an ideal, infinitely thin, wholly static cross section through a four-dimensional solid or tesseract of unimaginable intricacy.”15 The moment, caught on the surface of a photograph, can be examined like a slide under a microscope. Because of its stilling effect, the photograph is an effective means to explore the complexity of the visual and temporal world. The stillness of the photograph suggests that it is also an agent of death, as Roland B arthes claims in Camera Lucida. In t his b ook, B arthes returns to early notions of the photograph where the image is seen almost as a natural deposit that holds a frozen moment of time. Photographs record the closing of each instant, the movement of time. Each photograph, as a “that has been,” maps and confirms the structure of time as a series of discrete moments. The photograph represents t he mo dern understanding of time as ra tional and irreversible. Photography also presented the possibility of a co mplete visual r ecord. In the ninet eenth century, Oli ver Wendell Holmes, b ewitched by t he p ower of photography to document, wrote, “There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon . . . but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed — representatives of billions of pictures. . . . Give us a f ew negatives of a t hing worth s eeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you please.”16

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Photographs replace the actual site in Holmes’s dream. It suggests a possibility of a totalizing structure that can capture every aspect of an object. Photography introduced the p ossibility of creating world-spanning archives of photographic images that have the same status as other scientific collections. These co llections o f imag es, suc h as p hotographs o f w orks o f a rt, w ere t o democratize education, its advocates argued, and increase knowledge. They also risked the possibility of producing a collection of meaningless historical details. The development of these technologies of recording and preserving also prompted anxiety — a sense that the materials being saved would be beyond the scope of meaningful memory.17 The proliferation of photographs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demanded a kind of order, which was provided by the archive. Daguerre’s contemporaries grasped photography’s potential to aid in t he preservation and study of historic monuments. In his report to the Commission of the Chamber of Deputies in 1839, Dominique François Arago spoke of how useful photography would have been during the expedition to Egypt thirty years previously. In Arago’s report, it is evident that, even before it was disseminated, photography was a tool in the colonization and study of nonEuropean cultures. In this way, the photograph became another artifact collected in t he a nthropological, hist orical, a nd s cientific exp editions o f t he nineteenth century. Because of their multiple uses, photographs are objects that s eem t o b e alr eady a nalyzed, a rticulated, a nd disp ersed a mong ma ny categories. The photograph is therefore tied to the archive and the museum collection. It is one of the objects, along with paintings, sculptures, ethnographic materials, books, and buildings, preserved in large-scale projects of the nineteenth century in an effort to guard against the loss of “tradition” and history. During this period of wrenching social and technological change, historical and preservation societies, such as England’s National Trust, established in 1895, sprang up in Europe and the United States. Aided by the new recording technology available in the phonograph, the camera, and the movie camera, these societies undertook projects to record and preserve endangered wild places and historical sites, such as those of rapidly transforming Paris.18 Secondary archival a nd memo ry mec hanisms o f t he s ociological dis ciplines a nd t he museum took over the work of individual memory, storytelling, and traditional practices. The photograph was part of a project inspired by a sense of

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urgency in the face of rapid irreversible changes in this century of increasing “time consciousness.” From the beginning, photography was touted as a type of mnemonic device that produced artifacts. Portrait photography was p erceived to be materialized memory.19 Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre, himself, was quite excited by the possibilities of photographs as indestructible and collectible fragments of nature: “Everyone, with the aid of the Daguerreotype, will make a view of his castle or country-house: people will form collections of all kinds, which will be the more precious because art cannot imitate their accuracy and perfection of detail; besides, they are unalterable by light.”20 When the photograph is viewed as evidence, as something replete, it gathers all the old connotations of “natural wonder,” magic, tr uth, and fetish, directing attention away from its fundamental lack of what is t emporally and spatially beyond the frame. Early on, the photograph was associated with the idea of the fetish as a magical object.21 This fetishistic quality accords with Benjamin’s description of the daguerreotype as a relic. The photographic portrait becomes a fetish because it is perceived as the image of a now-lost person that has been detached and preserved in ma terial form. The photograph stands for an absent presence. At the same time, artifacts and photographs are always fragments.22 The photograph and the artifact correspond in the sense that they are both fragments of the milieu from which they have been taken. Barbara KirshenblattGimblett des cribes t he p rocess o f co llecting a rtifacts as o ne o f “defining, segmenting, and detaching” an object from its context. She describes the relationship between artifact and culture as t he relationship of part to whole. There is a t angible connection to the culture the artifact comes to represent in t he m useum co llection o r disp lay. B oth a rtifacts a nd p hotographs, lik e documents, were collected in archives with ambitions of being totalizing displays of knowledge. However, the photograph is an object that suppresses its inherent lack. Not only is it an isolated object that fits into your hand, the snapshot, “like death, is a n in stantaneous a bduction o f t he ob ject o ut o f t he w orld in to a nother world, into another kind of time.”23 Christian Metz goes on to identify this spectral aspect of the photograph with the fetish. The off-frame space is one of “terrifying absence.” It is terrifying because it is unframed, uncategorized, and unincorporated into a discourse of knowledge. In anthropological or ethnographic photographs and collections of artifacts, the photographic series is

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employed for comparison purposes. The series is als o employed for the development of a na rrative sequence, without which no basis f or comparison of the details presents itself to the viewer or any means to establish categories and classifications. In the process of looking at these images, viewers become aware of themselves looking, as the process becomes the conscious effort to construct meaning.

Photography Exhibitions One of the lessons we have learned about photography is t hat the arrangement of the images in a n exhibition context guides o ur reading of the images.24 As an element in a certain discourse, as Allan Sekula has argued in his essay “The Body and the Archive,” the image yields the type of information demanded by the logic of the archive or display itself. In Green’s simple hanging of photographs of the Kent State shootings in Partially Buried in Thre e Parts, there is a n allusion to this history of the way photographs have been used and displayed. The hanging of the black-and-white press photographs of May 4 suggests that the photographs be regarded as evidence — evidence that can be used for creating categories and classifications in the context of a photographic archive. The photographs in Michener’s book that hang on the wall in Partially B uried f unction to support Michener’s narrative as s omething that tells the truth. There has been debate in fine art museums about how photographs should be exhibited. Should these collections of photographs be exhibited as works of fine art or as evidence? In the twentieth century, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has been involved in these battles. One exemplary photography exhibition that uses its images as if they were evidence that tells a story is The Family of Man, one in a s eries of photography exhibitions organized beginning in t he 1940s a nd 1950s b y photographer Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Steichen’s shows treated each print not as an individual artistic object but rather as pa rt of an overall argument or story. For the show, the exhibition designer Paul Rudolph chose to hang large, unframed prints one in front of the other. Sometimes prints were allowed to overlap one another or were hung cheek by jowl, guiding t he way vie wers read the images. He clustered photographs with similar themes on the walls and e ven designed a sho rt cone-shaped st and on w hich photographs were

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positioned. Mary Ann Staniszewski has even suggested that the hanging was cinematic. The exhibition design was d ynamic, guiding viewers into small intimate spaces and inviting them to look at prints on ceilings and near the floor.25 At the same time, the background colors were muted and neutral, as is typical of modernist exhibition design. The Family of Man exhibition format invited viewers not to contemplate each image but rather to scan several images at once and determine the connection between them. And as conveyed by the exhibition’s critics, the theme was the fundamental unity of “mankind” across differences of class, race, and ethnicity, which was reinforced by a narrative structure and even mimicked the design of the illustrated weekly magazines such as Life, which were popular in the 1930s and 1940s. As viewers walked through the exhibition, they followed a dramatized story of love, birth, family, work, and death in which conflicts and differences are resolved. Composed of photographs made by not only fine art photographers but also photojournalists and others, the exhibition was based on the notion that photographs tell the truth, as expressed in Steichen’s essay at the beginning of the exhibition catalog, in which he describes the exhibition as a kind of mirror “of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.”26 What the viewer is able to read in a photograph is conditioned by culture and history.27 In his dis cussion of photographic connotation, B arthes suggests that photographs are evocative because of the way they produce meaning. The f rame is a n ess ential pa rt o f t he p roduction o f me aning. Ob jects depicted in photographs induce the associations but do not signify much in isolation. These rootless fragments can stand for anything. In trying to secure their significance, the viewer seeks connections between the images, moving across the rows of photographs, linking together the fragments. Her instinct is to develop a la rger and larger field of comparison, a co ntext, in o rder to limit the possible field of meanings in the group of photographs. But even at this level, the significance of these fragments is uncertain — and the process of s eeing b ecomes a co nscious o ne o f st udying a nd p uzzle s olving. I n t he photographs from the Michener novel in Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts, the viewer tries to discern the narrative of the events of May 4, 1970. Green’s fine art Cibachromes on the facing wall are part of a different kind of discourse: the photograph as fine art. These images are hung in a traditional museum style so that they can be evaluated in terms of aesthetic criteria. Museum discourse applies various frames to objects in order to abstract

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them from their original contexts. According to Svetlana Alpers, “The taste for isolating, this kind of attentive looking at crafted objects, is as peculiar to our c ulture as is t he m useum as a space o r in stitution w here t he ac tivity takes place.”28 The isolation of the object parallels the photographic frame. In Alpers’s statement, it is the frame of “visual interest.” This is part of the “ideology of seeing,” to quote Jennifer González, and, unexamined, remains embedded in the communications and workings of the museum.29 The treatment of the photograph as an object of fine art was epitomized by many of the photography exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art by the curator John Szarkowski in the 1960s. Derived from Alexander Dorner’s spare, mo dern in stallation design s a t t he H anover L andesmuseum in t he 1920s, Szarkowski’s installation design for his exhibitions imparted his opinion about the fine art status of photography.30 In these exhibitions, the prints were matted, framed, and hung in rows with a liberal amount of space around each. Even photographs that were not originally conceived as fine art, such as Timothy O’Sullivan’s photographs from survey expeditions to the West, were hung in the same manner. The hanging invited viewers to attend to the aesthetic quality of each individual print. This was a design that was also typical for the painting galleries in the Museum of Modern Art for many decades. In Green’s hanging, two competing forms of the exhibition and display of photographs are presented: the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic.31 In the context of a newspaper or book, the viewer might not pay attention to how t he imag es w ere f ramed a nd li t o r t o t he p hotographer’s c hoice o f subject matter but rather lo ok t hrough t hem for information. However, as Walter Benjamin noted, every document of history holds a set of hidden social relations that it is necessary to expose. “Denaturalizing” and defetishizing the photograph begins by placing it within its historical context.32 First, it is necess ary to understand t hat a p hotograph do es not have an intrinsic meaning. Allan Sekula describes the photograph as something that is always snatched up by a mo tivated discourse. The process of critique proceeds by discovering the historical discourse by which the photograph was snatched and analyzing its politics and their manifestation in readings of the image. As work from the 1970s o n the problem of documentary photography argued, the documentary photograph underwrites and supports whatever reading is given to it by the discourse into which it is incorporated. The photograph can be analyzed to reveal the conflicting discourses that “inscribe” it. But this type

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of analysis can take place only after the truth value of the photograph has been called into question. Green’s hanging of photographs asks us to engage in this type of inquiry. It alludes to the way the notion of “document” has b een complicated since the 1970s, a nd we can see a similar tendency in t he use of photographs by other artists such as Mark Dion, Fred Wilson, and Matthew Buckingham. In Green’s installation, it is obvious that the viewer is removed, by many layers of material, from the original event represented, as well as the original context of t he recording. This naturally le ads t he vie wer to question t he story being told by this sequence of images of the events leading up to the Kent State shootings. This critical awareness is encouraged throughout the various elements of Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts. This form of inquiry about the past is made possible by the materialization of memory in the form of photographs and recordings. In Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts, the framed photographs and fragments from Robert Smithson’s woodshed allude to a history and culture of preservation and recording. The objects and images are materialized memory. All of the materials in t he installation a nd t he a rtist’s memo ry a re t hreaded t hrough ob jects t hat ha ve been mass produced or reproduced by these recording technologies. The representation of time has altered since those salvage projects were begun in the nineteenth century. Green’s work perhaps helps to deal with the anxiety of a culture that tries to save so much of the past. The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.33

It is t he twentieth-century version of t hese same recording technologies that have provided the materials for Green’s installation but also connect to the childhood memory in the work. These images, incidents, and objects are part of a network. This quotation from Foucault is also suggestive in terms of Green’s work on particular sites. The artist’s assemblage of a material archive connects sites as disparate as Korea and Ohio in both time and space. Thes e sites have been connected in a network through these objects, materials, and

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photographs. For instance, the music played by neighboring kids belongs to the general category of 1970s popular music. And each record in itself is only one of a vast collection of identical Jackson 5 and Sly Stone vinyl records that have b een p roduced. The m usic als o r efers t o a g enre o f “American p op music,” which has i ts own history and cultural connotations in t he United States in the 1970s. The record is also connected to a vast marketing industry that promotes music from the 1970s as nost algia. A single object, such as a vinyl l p, pressed in 1970, is a complex historical object located in a network of relationships. Green has stated that her interest in recording devices was inspired by her father, who worked in electronic engineering and was also an avid photographer. A s a y oung c hild, she b egan t aking p hotographs wi th a n I nstamatic camera and recording sound with an Aiwa reel-to-reel tape recorder. Thes e interests are reflected in t he connection b etween t he materials in Partially Buried and the personal memory that is related.34 The t v news of the shootings at Kent State connects to newspaper and television accounts across the country of the events, which in turn informed James Michener’s narrative in the book Kent State. These accounts have now become recordings, video and film tapes, and archival material. The broadcast images are now part of a series of images shot by camerapersons and photographers at Kent State. Thes e snapshots belong to a series of identical reproductions in papers and books around the world. In t he video Partially B uried C ontinued, G reen underlines t he fac t t hat these images have been reproduced in a variety of contexts by filming a slide as it is projected on the living-room wall. It also occurs in Green’s filming of hands flipping through books with photographs or in the frequent panning over photographs. In this way, by using this collage structure, Green questions the authority of the original context and discourse in w hich the image was placed by showing that the image can be placed in several categories at once: representation, do cumentation, art, history, nost algia, mass-media imag es, and personal memory.

Archival Art Archival installations could be said to fall out of the photo conceptual practices of individuals such as Hollis Frampton and Sol LeWitt in the 1960s, as

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well as the work of Marcel Broodthaers, whose Musée d’art moderne de la ville is usually cited as a n early example of archival work that questions the assumptions and precepts of the museum. These strategies have been particularly useful for artists who are interested in questioning how we understand memory and how history is p roduced. For artists of color or of ethnicities whose histories have been distorted, suppressed, or exploited, these are important practices, as Jennifer González has cogently demonstrated.35 Some works of this sort question categories and hierarchies produced in various disciplines — from anthropology to history. Fred Wilson’s most critically discussed work Mining the Museum in 1992 at the Maryland Historical Society is the quintessential example. The work in that exhibition was to bring to the surface an African American history that was conspicuously absent in the museum prior to Wilson’s arrival. At the Seattle Art Museum, for the exhibition Mixed Metaphors, he performed another kind of intervention in the Egyptian section of the museum. In a small , vertical wall-mounted display case, Wilson exhibited an arrangement of traditional African headrests. The arrangement co nforms t o t he exp ected f ormat o f a n et hnographic disp lay where many examples are housed in a g lass case for comparison.36 Because the forms of the headrests are all very similar, Wilson was able to compose an arrangement based on repetition and variation within a s quare format. He surrounds a la rge, b right ala baster he adrest wi th f our da rk, w ooden o nes. Thes e shifting categories based on form create a unity of repetition and difference. The shapes form a unified, abstract composition. The stated purpose of the display is to demonstrate the mutual influence of styles of headrests in the continent of Africa, including the culture in Egypt of which the alabaster headrest is a n exa mple. The ca tegories a nd me anings t hat a re hig hlighted in Wilson’s work raise questions about how institutions organize knowledge and objects. Mark Dion’s work is als o an archival practice that is r esearch based and focuses on specific sites, their histories, and their ecologies. In New England Digs (2001), Dion and a group of volunteers dug at three different sites near Brockton and New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island. The resulting materials, ranging from buttons to antique marbles, were then displayed in wooden cases — according to not a scientific classification but other criteria instead, such as color or material. Like Wilson and Green, Dion encourages his viewers to question the systems of knowledge and ordering by

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which he or any other institution or authority might frame objects. He takes as his inspiration the cabinet of curiosity and the notion of the dilettante or amateur s cientist. Karsten B ott’s work One of Each (1993) co mes f rom his Archive of C ontemporary History — an ongoing project whereby he co llects everyday objects, cataloging and storing them — and is a nother form of archival installation. This is a p roject that because of its overwhelming scale essentially renders the effort to collect, categorize, and classify meaningless. He brings out specific parts of the collection for exhibitions, organizing the objects in various ways. David Bunn makes pieces using the discarded card catalog of the Los Angeles Public Library. The work consists of found language and poetry, produced by arranging the cards to make sentences or bits of verse. In this work, sequence and syntax are literally the structure of the work because the material derives from a system of categorization. The Center for Land Use Interpretation (c l u i) based in Los Angeles gathers and displays information about certain aspects of land use in the United States and other countries. Their project Urban Crude: The Oil F ields of the Los Angeles Basin is a tour of active oil fields in t he city of Los Angeles. The project provides maps and photographs with captions that give information about these sites. The project currently has a w ebsite but also existed as a n exhibit. The work of the c l u i is archival and based on the display of information, but the overall goal of the group is to interpret and give a historical context to the interventions in the land. The group’s work epitomizes an archival installation practice. The s econd typ e o f in stallation p ractice I call p hotographic in stallation, and it often includes still photographs installed in a n exhibition space in a manner t hat enco urages r eflection o n ho w imag es a nd la nguage acq uire meaning. They use the strategies of position, juxtaposition, and shock, as in avant-garde collage. L ike archival installations, t hese works are s ometimes site sp ecific or site focused, but unlike archival installations, w hich have a flexibility of form, photographic installations are sensitive to the manner in which t hey a re h ung a nd t he s equence in w hich e ach indi vidual imag e is seen. These works ultimately have their origin in the photo practices of artists such as John Baldessari with his work from the Rooms exhibition or of Hans Haacke with his work Shapolsky et al, which was to be displayed at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971. These installations of photographs focus on the series and sequence of photographic images and the ideological function of

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captions. They tend to use the conceptual practice of combining image and text, using the sequence of images to produce meaning. This category could include the work of Adrian Piper, Louise Lawler, and even Cindy Sherman in the Artists Space exhibition in 1978. Piper and Lawler continue to make work that responds to the literal and figurative context of photographic display. Lawler has made subsequent works that responded to the context, asking the viewer to think about the meaning of the images and the objects displayed in t he images. In 1982, a t Metro Pictures, for instance, Lawler put together an exhibition of artists who were all part of Metro Pictures. She then titled the installation Arranged by Louise Lawler, making the installation her o wn work. In a do ubling of the activity of the galler y, Lawler calls into question the gallery’s choices and exclusions. Another different manifestation of this might be Barbara Kruger’s room-sized installations of images and text at Mary Boone Gallery. In that installation, which took place in t hree different exhibitions between 1989 a nd the early 1990s, the walls were covered with text and images that the viewer was expected to read. Kruger’s work in t his project produced an installation that one could literally read but that also responded to a certain extent to the viewer’s position in the room. Another group includes works that place photographs and text in a na rrative or linear sequence. Carrie Mae Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996) is an installation of thirty-three archival photographs, tinted red, depicting men and women of African descent framed in black, round frames. Each image has a text commenting on the image or the experience of the individual in the photograph. Some are slaves or victims of lynching, and others are musicians and writers. The text and images respond to each other and must be read in a sequence. The rhetorical and emotional power of the work comes from the order in which the images are read. This piece works to undo t he objectifying aspect of these pictures of people of African descent. Douglas B lau’s w orks co mprise a rchives o f r eproductions o f pa intings, photographs, and other kinds of images. In these works, Blau knits together a story based on the categorization of a group of images. The images are small and hung cheek by jowl in a manner to get the viewer to read from one image to the next. His work is similar in many ways to both Green’s installations and some of Fred Wilson’s, such as a series developed from the photo archives of

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the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (j jd c ) in N ew York in 1999 for the exhibition To the Rescue: Eight Artists in an Archive. The archive photographs of H r r R and H pe were taken to record the history of the jjd c in ac tion around t he w orld. Wilson c hose a s eries of imag es and covered them with matte board, leaving only a small portion of them visible. In the remainder of the sixty imag es, Wilson denies t he viewer the context of the fragment. The photographs are arranged on three walls in grids of 4 by 5 inch matted and framed images. Only small segments of each photograph are revealed in slits and squares. The structure of the project is an invitation to the viewer to make sense of a series of fragments. Photographic installations of this sort are about making sense of a group of visual fragments. Matthew Buckingham’s The Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the Year 502,002 c.e. takes the form of a timeline focused on the Mt. Rushmore monument in South Dakota. The timeline extends into the prehistoric past and far into the future, when the famous presidential faces have eroded from the rock. Across the timeline, the viewer learns of the political deception played on the Native Americans and the social context of the monument. It ends wi th a “photograph” of the eroded monument five hundred thousand years in the future. The timeline raises questions about the history of the monument by framing it in a different way, especially in the context of Native American history. Each of t hese a rtists a nd co llectives us es a n a rchival stra tegy t o ra ise q uestions about how information is produced, how history is written, and how subaltern identities are framed and positioned within contemporary culture.

The Serial and Syntactical Structure of Green’s Work In addi tion t o t he K ent S tate p hotos, t he first ro om of Partially B uried i n Thr ee Parts inc luded a tr io o f li thographs o f t he p hilosopher a nd p olitical activist Angela Davis. The first lithograph is t he cover of a 1970 Life magazine, w hich featured her in volvement with t he Black Panthers. The photograph catches her in a moment in court when her head is slightly bowed, and her eyes are cast downward, as if she is contrite. She sports her “natural” hairstyle, which indicates her commitment to black radical politics. The caption reads “ The Making of a Fugitive: Wanted by the fbi — Angela Davis.” The photograph and t he caption s eem to promise a girl-g one-wrong magazine story. But the next lithograph of the series juxtaposes an image of Davis in a

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classical-style portrait with the Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno with whom she st udied in G ermany. Davis’s image in t his context connotes not “young regretful outlaw” but an intellectual whose political position is supported by a hist ory of radical p olitical p hilosophy. In t he final lithograph, however, Davis’s image has dropped out, and what remains is the hairstyle. It is a 1990s fashion advertisement with the words “Afro Power,” which features young models with the same hairstyle. The notion of outlaw and radicalism is being used to sell clothing. The image has ossified into pure connotation. As critics such as Brian Wallis have noted, the lithographs seem to tell a story of dec line. Ro land B arthes demo nstrated t hat c ultural co nnotations a nd codes supplied by t v shows and t he mass media co lonize photographs s o that the image becomes a collection of cultural signs. The specificity and urgency of the historical moment when the shutter clicked is replaced by something else. In the context of Green’s installation, however, as ca n be seen in G reen’s other arrangements of images, the trio of lithographs connected to Angela Davis need not be read in one direction as a na rrative of tragic decline into hollow connotation. We can read the order in reverse, from the advertising image of the “natural” hairstyle to the original context for that connotation, which is the life and activism of Angela Davis. For, in fact, when read in this way, t he connotation t hat accr ues to t he hairstyle in t he 1990s ad , as hi p, edgy, and defiant, spins the original reading of the Life magazine imag e of Davis as def eated and on the run. A s ense of Davis as a hist oric heroine is reawakened. The p iece sug gests t hat nei ther t he a ffective a nd a ssociative aspects of these images — the historical — nor their structural relationships should take precedence in our consideration of them. The lithographs form a series that can be read in either direction, and the sequence allows us to see that the images that can fall into many categories at once. The nonhierarchical and serial nature of Green’s work recalls the structure of a Minimalist or conceptual work of art, based on a series of units, which Robert Morris des cribes in “ Notes o n S culpture” as “ sets, s eries, mo dules, and simple systems.”37 Donald Judd favored the compositional strategy of the repetition of identical units because it was a me ans of avoiding work based on subjective choices or the balance of separate parts. Green has als o mentioned her interest in S ol LeWitt’s method of producing works by objective logical systems. But unlike the Minimalist cube, Green’s unit, the photograph

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F I G U R E 2 . 3 M arion Faller (1941–) and Hollis Frampton (1936–1984), # 782 Apple Advancing [var. “Northern Spy”], from Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion, 1975. Gelatin silver print, 71/8 in. x 12 7/16 (18.1 cm x 31.59 cm). Gift of Frank Stella (PA 1954).

Black-and-white photograph © Marion Faller. Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, 1990.52.16.

or the frame of film, has historical or narrative content and is shot through with associations. It is illusionistic, as Hollis Frampton would say. Frampton’s photographic practice also shares the basic structure of a Minimalist work of art. Frampton turned to photography and pop art in the 1960s in the midst of abstract, anti-illusionist art, because they “harbored illusionism, la nguage, a nd exp lorations o f visual syn tax a nd h umor.”38 Fr ampton made s eries of photographs employing a mo dular format in his E adweard Muybridge–influenced p hotography. H is s eries, ho wever, suc h as Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion from 1975, wi th titles such as Squashes Vacillating or Mature Radishes Bathing, were actually funny. A similar project from the early 1970s, A Visitation of Insomnia was a series of photographs taken of a nude woman arriving, performing exercises, and leaving. The series was divided into twenty-four sections, the same number of frames in one second of film. Frampton’s image lightens the seriousness of these images, w hich in t heir nineteenth-century context demonstrated t he triumph of rational constructions of time.

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The serial structure and interest in n umerical and alphabetical order recurs in Frampton’s films. Frampton made the single image a unit in a structure whose order is established by the relationships between the images of his films and the structure of the film itself. Frampton was interested in producing a photographic/filmic project as extensive and encyclopedic as the world. His ambition is reminiscent of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s dreams of a totalizing p hotographic a rchive. F rampton tr ied t o r ealize his ide a o f a n in finite cinema in his epic thirty-six-hour film Magellan. Nora Alter points to the fact that Green in her videos also seems to have the goal of producing a total cinema. Green quotes Frampton in several places in her work, and she showed his film Nostalgia in the film series she organized for the exhibition Between and Including in 1999 in Vienna. Frampton the filmmaker conceived of his films as f ragments or as a v ocabulary of images organized, like Sol LeWitt’s work, according to random sequences and series based on different categories. He also conceived of his films as archives of images but organized in playful and arbitrary orders. In Hollis Frampton’s 1971 film Nostalgia, the camera focuses on a b urner on which a p hotograph is p laced and reduced to cinders. As t he photograph burns, a voice describes a scene that the viewer cannot see, relating interesting a necdotes a bout i t. A s t he film co ntinues, t he vie wer r ealizes t hat t he narrator is describing photographs — not the photograph that is burning but rather the next photograph in the series to be burned.39 Important information and stories about the circumstances of the shot are being related before viewers can even see the image, prompting them, once they see the image, to scramble to remember what the narrator said about it as it disappears. Thes e images are photographs taken by Hollis Frampton before he became a filmmaker. Frampton destroys his photographic archive to produce a filmic one, while at the same time pointing to the gap between experience and representation, and photograph and memory.

Journeys through Archives: Some Chance Operations She tries to remain calm in the face of the disorder of the project. Reading film encyclopedias and surviving film stills, she also reads about alphabets, as a memory device and order, A–Z over and over, 26 locations to store everything. — Some Chance Operations

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Mary Ann Doane describes film as an archive. “In it,” she writes, “images are stored, time itself is stored.”40 Considering Green’s videos as a s ort of filmic archive reveals a key connection between her installations and videos. Both involve iden tification wi th a p rotagonist a nd t he p ractice o f walkin g. The protagonist acts as the point of connection between the viewer and the complex archival structure of the film, represented in Some Chance Operations by the complexity of the city of Naples. In the video Some Chance Operations, the filmmaker seems to be searching for order in the midst of an everexpanding cache of images and anecdotes. The pretext for the film was t he artist’s jo urney t o Naples t o uncover memories of t he now-forgotten e arly twentieth-century Neapolitan silent filmmaker Elvira Notari. Green was interested in the ephemerality of film as an archival medium exemplified by the fact that the film scholar Giuliana Bruno was a ble to uncover only a sin gle complete film by Notari, some scripts, and a f ew film stills.41 In her videotape, Green explored the possibility that Neapolitans might remember Notari. Some Chance Operations is made of found footage; films shot in Super 8; texts from writers such as Walter Benjamin, Hollis Frampton, and Eduardo Cadava; and interview sequences that tell a story of looking for evidence of Elvira Notari. The film itself utilizes collage and serial structures. Green creates a protagonist for the viewer to follow through Naples, a Neapolitan woman with red hair named Clara, who takes the place of the filmmaker herself and who navigates the complex space of Naples. Because Green shuns a single, coherent plot line, the viewer is forced to pay attention to the order and sequence of the images, texts, and other information in t he film, prompting a desire to rewind the tape and retrace the threads that are lost to memory as the film proceeds. The intricate quality of Green’s films rhymes the avant-garde films of other artists, of an older generation, such as Frampton, Chris Marker, and Yvonne Rainer. Some Chance Operations has both structural elements and image sequences similar to Rainer’s Journeys from Berlin. Both films were inspired by Walter Benjamin’s meditations on memory, artistic production, and political action. Journeys from Berlin interweaves the dialogs of three different groups of people: a woman with her psychoanalyst, a couple at home discussing political activism, and an adolescent girl with her diary. The woman (Annette Michelson) with her psychoanalyst recalls her life in disjointed, disconnected phrases and images. At times, her difficult-to-follow recollections are quotations from

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political writings or poetry. Although the couple’s conversation is easy to follow, we can only hear them making meals or drawing baths as they recall the history of radical p olitical action in E urope. As they talk, the camera pans over a typical fireplace mantle of a middle-class home on which rest framed pictures, as well as piles of cold spaghetti, handguns, and pliers. We never see the teenage girl. Instead, she reads her diary entries as the camera films cities and ruins from the air. Each character’s dialog is a collage of quotations that is adopted or inserted into a personal situation.42 Green’s videotape is less fragmented and much shorter than Rainer’s film, but both have silent sequences in which only quotations flash on the screen. They both use a va riety of film stocks that help create a visual rh ythm and collage structure in each film. Both have images of the ruins of Pompeii and interviews — psychoanalytic sessions in Journeys — where p eople a re q uestioned about their experiences and memories, as well as shots of people walking through city streets. Journeys from Berlin is built around and titled after a quotation in Walter Benjamin’s chapter “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” which Rainer surreptitiously inserts as part of one of the character’s own memories in t he film. “[Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert] everything that we have experienced on mournful railway journeys (railways are beginning to age), on godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of great cities, in the first glance through a rain-blurred window of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action.”43 The same sense of lonely journeying occurs in Green’s Partially Buried and Partially Buried C ontinued. A b ody walks t he streets of t hese cities. In s equences produced in neig hborhoods in Cle veland and t he streets of S eoul and Kwangju, the camera acts as an eye filming the streets, electric signs, and buildings. This body must read the space and make sense of it. In an opening sequence in the film Some Chance Operations (1999), t he narrator speaking on behalf of “the filmmaker” explains, She’d read a book called Streetwalking on a Ruined Map about Elvira Notari and her city films. The title reminded her of her own walks and circuitous searches in different cities. The ruined map made her think of places she’d tried to visit where the map no longer coincided to the locations in the present. She’d spent time walking daily in a crumbling European seaside city

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searching for old maps of travel routes and for places reconfigured many times before she’d arrived. . . . Her voyage became symbolic, a quirky meditation among tourists. The distance between the times and locations always seemed in excess of her goals. The goals themselves seemed arbitrary, erratic. Based on chance.44

Although th e film has a dis connected str ucture, t he p rotagonist is t he thread t hat wends its way t hrough Some Chance O perations. As she walks through the streets of Naples, each of her enco unters flashes on the screen in the form of images. In both Journeys from Berlin and Some Chance Operations, the viewer is invited to identify with a protagonist as a way of navigating t hrough t he p roliferation o f ra ndom imag es, q uotations, a nd s ounds. Green describes herself as an “avid pedestrian.”45 Walking forms a significant part of her r esearch process, and its do cumentation in t he form of photographs and videotapes appears in many of Green’s installations. Thes e range from Import/Export Funk Office, which includes a video of the streets of Manhattan at night, to the film Some Chance Operations. The documentation of Green’s wandering in videos and photographs depicts the artist walking and sometimes filming the streets of cities in Europe and Asia from moving cars. Green’s videos, which trace journeys through various localities, recall another archival film: Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s 1928 Man with a Movie Camera. In this film, the protagonist films various things while wandering in Odessa, Russia. According to Lev Manovich, “Its subject is t he filmmaker’s struggle to reveal (social) structure among the multitude of observed phenomena. Its project is a brave attempt at an empirical epistemology that has but one tool — perception.”46 Vertov gathered archival material of life in this city with his movie camera and assembled it to produce the film. This film is an archive, but it also tells the story of its own making, including sequences depicting Vertov’s partner, Elizaveta Svilova, sorting and editing reels of film that will be used in the final cut. Manovich points to this as an example of a film that is at the intersection of the database and the narrative film. Green’s videos a re simila rly co mplex a nd s elf-reflexive. The filmmakerartist is one of the protagonists with whom we, as viewers, are invited to identify as we watch the film. There are three characters in this film that guide the viewer. The visible character, the filmmaker’s double, Clara, is the figure we follow through the streets. The camera assumes Clara’s point of view, taking

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in random shots of street life in Naples: crowds, the marble Galleria, the port, and the fish market, as she/t he camera moves through the city. We are also made aware of the filmmaker, who one assumes to be behind the camera and whose experiences conceiving and making the film a male na rrator relates. In Green’s installation work, the viewer also encounters the installation by strolling and reading, and this relationship of viewer to installation is figured in her films by the wandering and searching of the protagonist. In Green’s videos, it is t he body moving through the streets that links t he films to the installations. The movement of Clara’s body through the streets also signifies the process of navigating through a collection of information. This is the same process that the artist performed in producing her archive-like installations. The protagonist in the film connects the filmmaker-artist and the viewer who moves her body around and reads in Green’s archival installations.

The Examination of Document, Memory, and History in Partially Buried Continued The final darkened room in Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts held video projections of Green’s videos Partially Buried Continued and Slides of Korea. Thes e videos derive from Green’s childhood experience of watching her father’s slide show of p hotographs he t ook in K orea during t he Korean War.47 Partially Buried Continued opens with a familiar but now-outmoded private ritual. We hear the whir of a slide p rojector as t he image of a bird flying in a b lue sky comes into focus. The slides click and change while a narrator’s voice explains the circumstances of this scene. This slide show consists of snapshots that the artist’s father took during the Korean War. As a young girl, it was the artist’s first encounter with Korea. She has now been invited decades later to make a site-specific work for a b iennial there, in t he city of Kwangju, and out of curiosity she revisits the images and her father’s stories. Along with the familiar sounds of the slide projector, she has recorded her father’s voice as he tells the story of his deployment to Korea. We see her father in swim trunks, arms outstretched o n a T exas b each. We s ee t he dec k o f a mili tary shi p at s ea, streets in do wntown Seoul, and the dusty, dr y air force base where planes landed to refuel and where the artist’s plane lands some forty-odd years later. The videotape is a travelogue of sorts, composed as a montage, documenting the artist’s trip and her encounters with evidence of the past. The video

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revolves around her fa ther’s slide sho w and a s cene w here t he artist and a young Korean woman look at a book of photographs of a deadly 1980 protest in Kwangju. These sequences are interspersed with historical footage of 1960s protests in Berlin and Paris, still shots of Robert Smithson’s and other artists’ work in the 1970s, and various scenes of modern-day Kwangju. Thr oughout, an anonymous narrator tells us o f the artist’s thoughts about war, memory, and memorials. Partially Buried in Thre e Parts and Partially Buried Continued could be read as a way of connecting with public history via private memories. Both the installation and the videotape, as heterotopias, are built around correspondences between different times and places. And the video uses the strategies of collage and serial structure to raise questions about the relationship among these places and the memories of them. The photograph plays a central role in this work as well. Green was interested in S mithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed in pa rt because it is a w ork known through photos.48 As I suggested at the outset, Green’s work is in part a response to questions about the documentation of an earlier site-specific work and its meaning. Later in the sequence of the videotape Partially Buried Continued, when the artist looks at the book of images taken during the 1980 protest in Kwangju, the narrator explains her interest in the photograph: “She wanted to probe the force of photographs and the ways they were bound to the specificity of time, light, and materiality, yet were more than that.” B ecause the private ritual of the family slide show is now outmoded, it can be recontextualized within the broader scope of history. And because it was such a widespread format, the slide show can establish connections among different social groups and photographic practices. The slide show is also a kind of small-scale archive, and the way it is showcased in this film demonstrates the ways in which Green’s work asks us to question archival structures. The family slide show in Partially Buried Continued provides another example of Green’s critical practice in relation to photography and is an example of the use of a serial structure in her work. Green also uses the pleasure of the family slide sho w to connect with her vie wers and to engage them in a process of critical comparison that draws together the production of history, the limits of Green’s site-specific art practice, and finally, the production of Green’s own artistic subjectivity in her w ork. In this procedure of comparison, the strict divisions between historical document and personal memory, site and its representation, and autobiography and fiction are broken down.

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The images in the slide show, like the other images in Partially Buried, belong in many categories at once. Darsie Alexander notes that the slide show, consisting of individual images shown in seq uence, bridges the gap between still photography and film. 49 Slide shows were attractive to artists in t he late 1960s b ecause, unlike film, the sequences could be edited at any time. In a slide sho w, there can always be one more slide. It brings to mind Hollis Frampton’s description of the relationship between photographs and film. He writes, “There is nothing in the structural logic of the cinema filmstrip that precludes sequestering any single image. A still photograph is simply an isolated frame taken out of the infinite cinema.”50 At the same time, one could argue that the common format of the photograph connects images taken at any time and any place. The slide show in G reen’s video tape, t hen, is a nexus w here different imag es a nd p hotographic practices intersect. As t he format us ed in a rt history slide lec tures and classrooms, the slide show is a conceptual “common space” by means of which it is possible to make comparisons.

Slide Show as Memory At the same time, the family slide show generates a sense of familiarity and even identification among viewers who experienced this format, which is becoming a t hing of the past as ma jor photography companies shift to digital cameras a nd p rojectors. K odak decided t o ce ase t he ma nufacture o f slide projectors and bulbs in 2004. The slide show now marks a particular moment in history and has become a site charged with personal memory. The narrator of Partially Buried Continued describes in vi vid terms how the artist experienced her father’s slide show as a child. When Korea was first presented to her, it was in the form of still slide colour projections. Her father would say that these were taken during the war. He would describe what was in the image. She would ask the who and where of the images and he would give her an answer. Consecutive still colour images clicked one after another, shining on the screen in a dark living room, her father’s voice linking them together, the images, the distant location, the past and present.

As a child, the slide show was the means by which the artist experienced both a stra nge place and a dist ant past. The slide sho w fulfills some of the

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functions of photography laid out by Dominique François Arago in 1839, but it takes on in the twentieth century the added role of private memory practice. Green said she included the slide show in the videotape because it was so common in middle-class homes in the 1960s and 1970s. 51 This sequence in Partially Buried Continued undoubtedly evokes a warm feeling of recognition for many of Green’s audience, as a large segment of middle-class families in the twentieth century had been persuaded by Kodak and other photography companies that it was important to preserve their memories in the form of still color slide projections. When Mr. Green bought his Bosley B2 camera in the 1950s, Kodak was in the midst of a new effort to market color photography in the form of Kodachrome slide film. 52 The introduction of the slide film and the Kodaslide color transparency projector in t he 1930s was in tended t o increase t he s ales of snapshot photography equipment. Although the equipment itself required little skill, after the war the company aggressively educated its consumers via television ads to photograph the best moments of life, such as exotic travels, hunting trips, personal milestones, and family time. The luminous colors of the Kodachrome slide were an important part of its appeal. The color connected the images that one made at home to the movie screen, and advertisements where various color processes, such as the Technicolor process in film, had already been introduced. One slide manual from 1962 e ven holds up cinema as a n example to its readers, advising them to make stories from their slide s equences, complete with title shots. The text reads, “Every Hollywood epic has titles and so should your slide stories.”53 In this way, t he private exp eriences and stories of t he family slide sho w were connected to other mass media, suc h as mo vies, magazines, a nd television advertisements, and idealized in t he process. But also, the process of composing narratives or storytelling was part of the practice. In this way, the slide show fits in well with Green’s other works, which have the same structure of narrative and archive. Kodak’s slide ma nuals were an important part of this process. The company published them to show customers how to produce good pictures using their products and how to organize a good show. Like the early advocates of photography, t he representatives of Kodak felt it necess ary to demonstrate the varied uses of the color slide. The manuals seem to provide the technical information for any possible subject that an individual would like to photo-

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graph. And the authors emphasize the unique and fresh picture. At the same time, however, these manuals recommend to their readers what is appropriate to photograph. This contributed to the familiar poses and subject matter that populate amateur photographs and prompted Pierre Bourdieu to observe that, to an outsider looking at such pictures, the images depict not uniqueness or individuality but merely social role.54 If the family slide sho w was a wa y of practicing memory, then it was a n idealized form of family memory. The idealization of experience in the family snapshot connects it to nostalgia. The sociologist Fred Davis describes nostalgia as a n emotion that “envelopes all t hat may have been painful or unattractive about the past in a kind o f fuzzy, redeeming, benign aura.”55 The family slide sho w was o ne of t he r ituals of mo dern consumer c ulture t hat flourished in the nostalgia produced by the dislocations of modernization. In its marketing, amateur photography both encouraged and satisfied nostalgic longing. Based on the notion of an irretrievable but ideal past, according to Svetlana Boym, the pleasure of nostalgia arises in the sense of identification that it activates.56 The power of the family snapshot to solidify this sense of connection was w ell understood by the Kodak Company early in t he company’s history. But the sense of longing that characterizes nostalgia did no t enter into Kodak’s advertising until the turn of the twentieth century, according to Nancy Martha West. In her book Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia, West pinpoints a shift in t he co mpany’s ad vertising b etween t he 1880s a nd t he First World War. Initially, West argues, Kodak advertised photography as a healthy leisure-time activity. However, after 1900, K odak began advertising photography as a wa y to preserve the fleeting experiences of modern life.57 This marketing approach emerged within the context of a new understanding that the pleasures of a carefree, middle-class childhood are soon over in modern capitalist culture. The photograph becomes the means by which to reconnect with these vanished pleasures. At the same time, according to West, any sug gestion o f de ath, suc h as t he ninet eenth-century p ractice o f p ostmortem photography, was expunged from the photograph itself. Death is only implied in the framing of the motivation to photograph. In other words, life is fleeting; take pictures. West characterizes this evacuation of conflict from the snapshot as an aestheticization of experience and connects it to modern consumer culture. This aspect o f t he snapshot s eems t o ex clude i t f rom t he r ole o f do cumentary

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photograph. Transforming memory into something pleasant and easily consumed, the snapshot as nostalgia takes its place instead alongside other consumer goods that were populating private life and leisure time in the twentieth century.

History as Representation As a means of encountering history then, the family slide show seems problematic b ecause t he sna pshot is a n ide alized v ersion o f exp erience co nditioned by mass culture. Green’s videotape suggests there is something further to discover than what is initially offered by these images and the words that guide our understanding of them. The artist asks herself, what lies b etween the words and the photos? The notion of the slide show as a “common space” where a dialog can take place is reinforced by the serial structure of the videotape in which times, places, and photographic practices are juxtaposed. The common space created by Green’s use of the slide show provides the critical distance from which to survey the marketing of the slide show itself. Despite the emphasis on variety, uniqueness, and difference, the images in slide manuals of the 1950s and 1960s are quite uniform. The individuals depicted are middle-class white people caught in joyful moments. The y could be the inhabitants of any number of advertisements from those decades. And Mr. G reen’s sna pshots lo ok lik e a ny n umber o f vaca tion p hotographs. H e took pictures of Koreans and their houses and monuments, of his friends and associates, and of himself. But in t he 1950s, a n image of Mr. Green posing with white fellow soldiers, arms entwined, was no t yet a ma rketable image. And as such, it remained in the private realm of the family slide show until it was released in the historical context provided by the younger Green’s video. In this context, Mr. Green’s private snapshots highlight the exclusions of the ideal images used in marketing amateur snapshot photography in the 1950s. However, M r. G reen’s slides a re typ ical o f slide ma nual p hotographs in other ways. The narrator in the videotape notes that from the artist’s perspective the war seemed to have been incidental in Mr. Green’s images. And there is little sense of trauma, violence, or conflict in a ny of them. Mr. Green recorded only leisure-time images and relatively happy moments — shots of the unit’s Korean house boys playing soccer, of the air force base when it is still and empty, or rice paddies on a sunny afternoon. Because these images seem

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FIGURE

2 . 4 R enée Green, Korea Slides, 1997, still. Courtesy of the artist and Free Agent Media.

to be familiar vacation photographs, we even read the shots of bombed-out buildings and a woman squatting among ruins more as tourist photos than war images. The violence of the war seems quieted in Mr. Green’s slides, rendering them material for nostalgia. In the videotape, the family slide sho w scene mirrors another in w hich the young Korean woman Hae Sun Kim describes graphic images in a book about the deadly Kwangju protest in 1980. G reen included Kim in t he film because she remembered the Kwangju killings from childhood, but like the Kent State shootings for the artist, she only knew of the events through photographs. Kim was part of a collective of photographers that was documenting t hese killings by g overnment s oldiers in o rder t o keep memory of t he incident alive. In a dialog with the Kwangju documentary photographs via a collage structure, the suppressed historical and violent context of Mr. Green’s nostalgic slides resurfaces, revealing their connections to a longer history of political conflict and oppression in Korea.

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In describing her efforts to research the traumatic history of the May 18 protests, Kim says something interesting about memory: “The only people who really know what happened on May 18 w ere there at the time. Thos e who survived tend to be emotionally subjective rather than objective about what happened. Documenting what happened will take place after uncovering the truth about it.” Kim articulates the suspicion that personal memory arouses. What is t he status of personal memory in t he practice of history? How does one negotiate the gap between memory and document? The same question can be asked of any documentary photograph.

Genealogy When Renée G reen was wa tching her fa ther’s slide sho w as a c hild, Robert Smithson also happened to be making his slide works. Darsie Alexander observes that slide projection did not enter art practice until the late 1960s when artists, such as D an Graham, Marcel Broodthaers, and Robert Barry, began using it as a wa y of working through the differences among various media and as a tool in conceptual art strategies. Alexander suggests that the inspiration to use slide projection may have come from its use in other parts of an artist’s life, such as Rob ert Smithson and Nancy Holt’s salons where fellow artists showed and discussed their work. Green included in Partially Buried Continued an image, a slide w ork, of Smithson setting up a mirror displacement in a compost heap in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1969. 58 When asked about the connection between her father’s slides and Smithson’s slide works, Green said it was not direct. Her interest in Smithson and the history of avant-garde art, she said, is a critical interest. Slide projection, as a bridge between photography and film, allows artists to explore temporality, sequence, and duration. However, Green makes a reference to this practice as outmoded. For Green in t he 1990s, t he slide sho w is t he means by which to explore time in the form of history and memory, which crosses both the private and public realms. For this reason, we should regard the inclusion of Smithson’s slide work in the videotape, then, not as a reference to Smithson as a privileged artistic precedent who employed the slide show format but rather as one exa mple o f ma ny different p hotographic p ractices, inc luding G reen’s father’s own practice, that mark the period. The common format of the slide

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show allows a dialog t o be established between the photographs of a w hite avant-garde artist in t he 1960s a nd a middle-c lass black father and former soldier from Ohio. As I noted in the introduction, Craig Owens argued that photography is at the center of Smithson’s relationship of site to nonsite.59 For Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan, Smithson travelled to Mexico in 1969 a nd placed mirrors in t he earth and on the trunks of vine-covered trees, took photographs o f t hese si ted a rrangements, a nd t hen disma ntled t hem.60 In on e image, the mirrors, fixed in the earth, reflect the sky, a literal displacement of sky into earth. Like the mirrors, the photographs frame, crop, and flatten the visual information they hold. The photographs are the displacements of the actual sites. Combined with Smithson’s text, the photographs point back to something that no longer exists. The site exists only as representation. In this sense, the connection with Mr. Green’s slide show is clear. The process of mediation is clarified in Smithson’s Hotel Palenque, which is another set of slides taken with his Instamatic camera during his Mexico trip that he then exhibited as part of a lecture at the University of Utah in 1972. In the lecture, Smithson narrates his photos of a partially built but already decaying hotel. He guides his audience through the rooms of the hotel, marveling at hallways and abandoned swimming pools in the enthusiastic tones of the connoisseur, comparing tile floors and st airways to t he work of Jasper Johns and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and pointing to the incomplete walls and partial stairways as an example of “de-architecturization.” In the process, he romanticizes what he des cribes as t he “Mexican temperament.”61 While documenting the hotel, Smithson’s lecture critiques art history or the power of any academic discourse to interpret the foreign object and the exotic site. At the same time, Smithson appropriates the Mexican hotel as his own work of North American avant-garde art. In a certain sense, Mr. Green also treated his photographs as documents. He selected subjects in terms of the types of memories he wanted to preserve, choosing to photograph sites and incidents that, from his p erspective as an American soldier in Korea, were unusual or interesting. His slide show also reveals his thorny position as a f oreigner who interprets the Korean culture from his limited perspective. He expresses admiration for the history of Korea and the persistence of people in Seoul, but it is his description of the Koreans’ reactions to his ca mera that reveals the complexity of his p osition as a f or-

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eigner or t ourist. S ometimes, he no tes, Koreans w ould ob ligingly p ose for him, but other times they would turn their backs or hide because, Mr. Green tells his daughter, “They didn’t want you to take pictures of them.” The common format of the slide show as travelogue becomes the means by which we can draw connections between Smithson’s work in the late 1960s and Mr. Green’s snapshots in the 1950s. Mr. Green’s snapshots and his stories are conditioned by both his p osition as a n outsider to Korean culture and the conventional format of the amateur photograph. We see Korea through the filters of personal memory and mass culture in the form of conventional poses and subject matter. In Smithson’s slide sho w, we s ee t he diffic ulty of documentation, interpretation, and authority exaggerated in his p ose as a critic or historian. These connections b etween t he slide sho ws draw us t o the material context, which is Renée G reen’s videotape produced in the late 1990s. Green uses this format to make a point about her own position as an artist in relation to the site of Kwangju. Green’s videotape was made as pa rt of an invitation to t he Kwangju Biennial in 1997. As critics such as Miwon Kwon, James Meyer, and Hal Foster noted, t he p osition of site-specific artists in a g lobal art market is co mplicated. Asked to participate in exhibitions around the globe and often to produce work that addresses the culture and history of their sites, these artists are placed in t he p osition of interpreters and historians for t heir art audiences. They are asked to produce knowledge. Partially Buried Continued is a response to these difficulties. The narrator alerts us to the artist’s problem as foreigner in Korea, like her father’s, by noting, “Her status was f ragile, relative. She tried to tread softly.” Partially Buried Continued presents itself as do cumentation of the artist’s trip to Korea. The photograph as document is read as a source of knowledge. Green is aware of the authority she assumes w hen she engages in this practice. H owever, t he video tape unco vers ma ny p ossible r eadings o f i ts o wn material by emphasizing the ambiguity of the photograph in t he context of the serial structure Green appropriates via the slide show and by the collage structure produced in her film. In Green’s work, visual documents of a deadly protest in t he 1980s a nd photo-conceptual practices of t he 1960s a re connected to the private memory practices of an African American family. The implicit juxtaposition of t hese photographic practices and t heir mo des of presentation trouble the boundaries between memory and document. The

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way the photograph was dispersed among these many categories in the video Partially Buried Continued parallels the way they are treated in the installation of protest photographs in the first room of Partially Buried. The tension between the document and the memory is heightened in the juxtaposition of the photographs of the deadly 1980 protest in Kwangju with Mr. G reen’s sna pshots. D escribed b y H ae S un K im, t he imag es f ollow t he conventions of photojournalism rather than those of the amateur snapshot. We see them as evidence of a violent event. Placed in a dialog with Mr. Green’s Korea slides, it is clear how much is left out of his more nostalgic images. It is also clear that the individual memory and social perspective presented in amateur photography are conditioned by mass media conventions. But while the subjectivity produced in the photographs is conditioned by the conventions of amateur photography, the stories that accompany them reveal overlooked aspects of these histories. It is Mr. Green’s personal stories that illuminate the circumstances of each of the photographs and that draw their connections to an event that belongs to the realm of public history. In these photographs and stories, we as vie wers become privy to the personal experience of this historical event. Where Smithson’s narration of his Hotel Palenque slides emphasized the biased and partial interpretations of his experience of a foreign site, it is the very sort of biased and partial narration in Mr. Green’s personal stories that reveal new perspectives in the history of the Korean War. In this dialectical relationship, the photo document loosens the grip of the subjective identification of its interpreter. As representation in t he form of photographs, slides, and stories, memory can be analyzed and critiqued. At the same time, the photograph in the context of the family slide show is permitted to retain its powerful affective and subjective connotations. In this way, the photograph is co ntinuously decoded and recoded in t he serial and collage structure of the family slide show and the videotape.

The Photograph as Paradigm for Green’s Critical Practice The ambiguity of the photograph in Green’s videotape parallels the ambiguity of the subject in her work. Miwon Kwon criticized site-specific work, such as Green’s, for reintroducing the importance of the author-subject: “A nomadic narrative requires the artist as na rrator-protagonist.”62 But Partially Buried

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Continued actually opens up the artist-subject and renders its status indeterminate. Unlike Mr. Green’s first-hand accounts, an anonymous narrator with a B ritish accent des cribes t he a rtist’s exp eriences. G reen is ca reful t o distinguish herself from the artist here, finally referred to in t he videotape, although the man in the videotape is her father and the personal history referenced is informed by her personal history. The artist in the videotape is a persona that loosely mirrors Green herself, and we are never sure if the mirror image is acc urate. L ike t he subjectivity presented in p rivate snapshots, which is refracted through the conventions of snapshot photography, artistic subjectivity in this work is presented to us as mediated — only in the form of representation. This pa rallels p erhaps Amelia J ones’s a rguments a bout t he presence of the artist’s body in performance art. The same is true of the photograph. Connected by the common format of the slide show, the images produced by a black soldier in Korea in the 1950s, a white avant-garde artist in the 1960s, a black site-specific artist in the 1990s, and by implication ours are brought together in a dialog wi th images used in mass culture and knowledge disciplines. In Green’s videotape, the private snapshot becomes one among many recording practices. Placed in the montage str ucture of t he video, we s ee t he photograph as do cument, memory, and fiction. The slide show sequence in Partially Buried Continued is the metaphor for Green’s b roader cr itical p ractice, as w e a re made a ware t hat w e enco unter these sites, histories, and subjects only as r epresentations. Using the strategies of collage and serial structures, the video foregrounds the processes by which history is co nveyed while drawing our attention to the processes by which site is r epresented via p hotographs. The nost algic ple asure we no w derive from the slide show in Green’s video enables us as viewers to identify with these pictures and stories and thus engage in a critical reflection on the production and consumption of history and memory.

The Photograph as Link in Code: Survey Green’s recent work titled Code: Survey demonstrates how the structures of collage and series are used in the context of a digital database to raise questions about the meaning of photographs and other forms of documentation. Green has made other digital archives. The first was for her installation Import/

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FIGURE

2 . 5 R enée Green, Code: Survey, 2006. Courtesy of the artist and Free Agent Media.

Export Funk Office, which was put together while Green was teaching at the Academy of Fine Ar ts in Vienna. Code: Survey (figure 2.5) f rom 2006 was commissioned by the State of California and takes the form of a collection of images, texts, and recordings of memories and experiences associated with expressways in California.63 Code: Survey clarifies that the photograph, in G reen’s work, is a co mplex object whose meaning changes based on the words attached to it or the way it is framed by the images that precede and follow it. The piece takes various forms, but it is organized in a grid with each space in the grid bearing an alphanumeric code tied to an image. These separate images are linked to various keywords, which in turn are connected to other images, texts, maps, and recordings. A single image can be attached to various different texts. For instance, one photograph dating from around 1920 described as “Nettie Perry on a Jenny biplane” shows a black woman standing on the wing of a biplane. The image is accompanied by the tag words “aviation, history, Exodus, flight, movement, travel, women.” These words are linked to texts and sound r ecordings o f indi viduals r ecalling memo ries o r exp laining t hings, which illuminate one or another aspect of the image: women empowered by freedom of movement, the African Diaspora, the history of airplanes, and so on. The viewer can choose to read all of the texts or follow a different thread of images and texts. While in G reen’s videotapes and films the protagonist

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guided the viewer through the various images and texts, in t his piece, as in her installations, the artist turns more control over to the viewer. The title of the piece Code: Survey refers to two different activities that take place in t he development of an archive of information: surveying and then organizing that information so it can be retrieved again. There are many references to sur veillance in t he images and texts themselves including aerial photographs of jammed highways and images of control centers where workers monitor traffic patterns on video screens. Although these images speak to the use of surveillance to control the movement of traffic, the term also suggests that photographs viewed as documents, as in an archive or any system of information, have the power to objectify and control the individuals that are its subject matter. Code: Survey, as des cribed by Green, explores California’s romance with the freedom of the road provided by car culture. In reading through these images and texts, the browser discovers that the seeming limitless freedom of movement in our culture has b een managed, guided, and curtailed. For instance, images tied to the word “immigration” show the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War i i. This image links t o a photograph of a Chinese American pilot in the 1930s, a faded p ostcard of boats anchored in the harbor, and so on. Anchored within series organized in a grid, the photograph’s meaning is made more complex. We are given readings and counter-readings of the image based on the relationships established by the archive.

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The grid and the series, as the visual analogies for the archive, also emerge as t he q uintessential str uctures f or o rganizing inf ormation. The gr id a nd the series organize the modern systems of streets, indexes, buildings, maps, graphs, and tables. Rosalind Krauss in her analysis of Eugene Atget’s body of work argued that, because his work was organized as an archive, it dispelled the notion that Atget was a kind of fine artist.64 In conceptual art of the 1960s, rational systems of organization, such as the archive, were used to reduce the artist’s expressive contribution to the work. The viewer is invited to figure out the rules of the game, the formula that determined the work’s structure in Sol LeWitt’s serial sculptures or Hollis Frampton’s alphanumerical films. In Green’s works we are also asked, as we move through the installations, to determine the connection between the objects and images, to analyze the stories being told and the way they are being told, as well as to think about those things that are overlooked. If Marcel Broodthaers’s or Bernd and Hilla Becher’s archives exclude certain material in order to convey a certain message, Green’s focuses instead on having the viewer question how the document, the object, or the category is subject to the archival structure. Green’s installations position the viewer as r eader to question the rules and procedures of the archive.

Installations to Be Read In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the various techniques of mechanical and electronic recording that are available have produced material memory. Green’s work starts with memory as materialized in the form of an object to analyze. Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts begins with questions about the documentation of a si te-specific work and goes on to question how we evaluate documents of history and their relationship to memory. The archive is the structure that contains this form of materialized memory and many installation artists have employed the structure of the archive in t heir work. However, Green often us es a na rrative str ucture to le ad t he viewer into the work. The protagonist in G reen’s films becomes the person with whom the viewer identifies and follows through the film as archive. In the installations, the viewer becomes a kind of protagonist who sifts through the ma terial o f t he in stallation. The vie wer find t hreads t hat co nnect t he

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materials — as the art historian Alex Alb erro has noted — constructs narratives, and finds discrepancies. The viewer, in browsing through the installation’s materials, mimes Green’s own research practice. The viewer is a critical reader who discovers that the significance and meaning of objects in t he archives, and the memories and evidence of history in the form of photographs, documents, and objects, can change based on their relationships and arrangements. Green’s work uses the structure of collage and series, grid and archive, to invite the viewer to question how meanings are produced from these materials. In that process, the photograph as document is revealed to be an ideological object whose frame guides our reading of it. Green’s work is distinct among other kinds of sitespecific in stallations t hat t ake t he f orm o f a rchives in t hat i t involves t he viewer in the process of reading, interpretation, and the production of history and memory.

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the poetics of experience A N N H A M I LT O N ’ S I N S TA L L AT I O N S A N D P H O T O G R A P H S

The Picture Is Still The building sits at the edge of a ha rbor presided over by submarines and destroyers whose flags wave in the breeze. The only feature that distinguishes this building from the dusty warehouses around it is the Chelsea-style frosted glass door. Pushing open the door, I feel first the relative coolness and darkness of the space. A slight tinkling sound accompanies my movement, as the breeze follows me into the building. It is dark because the ceiling is hung with lines o f c harcoal stic ks da ngling pa rallel t o t he gr ound f rom str ings suspended above me. They hang in a thick cloud, causing an immediate sensation of claustrophobia, as my head penetrates the mass. The charcoal is also the source of the chiming sound, as the sticks, rendered crystalline in their transformation to charcoal, strike each other in the breeze. It is difficult to determine the dimensions of the room because the light from the doors reaches only so far. But despite the gloom, one begins to sense the relative emptiness of this space, an emptiness underscored by a low, watery tone, almost like a whale signal. It echoes from the bare concrete floors and metal walls of two welded, metal tunnels and from the massive I-beams sunk in a trench that cuts across the floor. As they ascend to the ceiling, the I-beams disappear into the mass of charcoal. Once I walk among the strings of c harcoal a nd lo ok u p at t he ceilin g, I r ealize t hat w hat ini tially s eemed quite dense is q uite sparse. And as y ou move through the charcoal, it is almost like walking through a swimming school of fish. The strings reach past my shoulders and the sticks ring as I walk through them. The entire space is not that large; the echoes make it seem much larger than it is.

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The trench leads the viewer toward the tunnels. They are massive, made of steel and concrete, and they seem quite old. As I enter the musty right-hand tunnel, I realize the strange watery sound is coming from a video projection on the back wall. In the video, a camera pans over a black-and-white photograph of a p erson with an open mouth. It s cans t he contours of t he he ad, mouth, and body. It is difficult to read the picture, and the camera lens, which must b e tiny, dist orts t he imag e. A w hispering v oice na rrates t he ca mera’s discoveries. To be in this space is like being underwater in the hull of a ship or an empty, dry tomb. The strange effect is deliberate. This eerie space, which was located in a small warehouse in the city of Yokosuka, Japan, is Ann Hamilton’s installation the picture is still from 2001. I chose this particular installation because it is one of the few by Hamilton that I have experienced first hand. Claire Bishop in her book Installation Art: A Critical History writes that installations depend on the viewer’s presence in and direct experience of the space. This is tr ue in ma ny cases, but what happens when the majority of people see installation art, as in t he works in the previous chapter, in p hotographs only? Seeing the picture is s till in si tu provides me with the opportunity to compare the first-hand experience of an installation to photographs of it to understand what is lost and what is gained in the photographic documentation of installation art. Hamilton was invited by Akira Ikeda Gallery to make the installation. This unremarkable space in trigued her b ecause of its notable history. When she first s aw t he building, w hich was le ased by Akira Ik eda f rom t he Japanese government, it had been fashioned into a regular exhibition space with white walls and concrete floor. She noticed that the welded metal tunnels were visible, rising above the floor, but completely ignored. She decided t o inquire about the building’s history. During World War ii, she was informed, torpedoes were loaded o nto ships through the tunnels. Learning this, Hamilton wanted to explore the site’s connection to history — not to re-present it but to evoke the gravity of that history. The picture is still is one among a group of installations that Hamilton made in the 1990s that engaged with histories of particular sites in various ways. For the picture is still, she chose to uncover the original bones of the building and thereby expose the history hidden by the gallery’s “white cube” format. Like Renée Green, Hamilton begins her installations by doing a great deal of research. She knew that Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr., the pilot of the plane

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the Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, lived in her ho me town of Columbus, Ohio. Searching for connections to Tibbets, she lo oked through the photo archives at the Ohio H istorical Society for images from World War ii. In the process, she was struck by the way the photograph distances the viewer from the moment it depicts.1 The German critic Siegfried Kracauer had also noticed the distancing effect of photographs decades e arlier. Looking at a p ortrait photograph, Kracauer described shivering at the reduction of a living person to a conglomeration of immobilized ob jects.2 Ro land B arthes, lo oking a t p hotographs o f his la te mother, w ould later des cribe t he p hotograph as “ flat de ath,” a co ncise description of the way the photograph flattens and abstracts that which it depicts but also preserves the moment now lost.3 The title of Hamilton’s installation speaks to the nature of the photograph and its connection to history. It is both still and still here, while the moment has vanished.4 For Hamilton, the sense of loss she experienced in looking at the photograph leads to a desire to restore the fullness of that moment in o rder to understand it. “Something about this became apparent as I lo oked at more and more photographs — of t he wa r — the a trocities o n b oth sides — we ca n’t under stand f rom t he pictures — we can’t have that time back. Yet its very history is a constant and invisible presence in our time.”5 Although Hamilton is wr iting about history in t his quotation, her st atement is also an accurate characterization of the tension between installation art that requires the viewer’s bodily experience of the work and photographs of t he work. For t his typ e of installation art, t he photograph is ma rked by loss. Installation artists who make works in this vein, like Hamilton, regard the viewer’s experience of the installation to be of primary importance. The aim of Hamilton’s installation work is t o break down the distance that remains between viewer and artwork, to engage the viewer through the body and the senses. Photographs of the work, however, reduce the complexity of the bodily experience of it. Hence, photographs present a problem for Hamilton’s work because they condition, as w e have seen from chapter 1, ho w a work of art is perceived and understood for both its current and its historical audience. Hamilton’s installation the picture is still grapples with this problem in the historical experience of war that has been forgotten. Hamilton chose to deal with photographic documentation differently from Green and other artists who work with and make archives and who seek to understand memory

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and history through these formats. Hamilton’s installation tries, instead, to conjure the way the war continues to haunt the present through a corporeal experience. Another body of Hamilton’s work from the late 1990s p inpoints the moment an experience turns into image. To make these pieces, a willing subject must stand before Hamilton, in close proximity to her face, and stare at her mouth for an extended period of time. The artist holds in her mouth a small simple pinhole camera for which she us es her li ps as a kind o f shutter. The images that are produced look like eyes at the moment they open. The sitter’s r esponse t o t heir exp erience is o ften p lain in t he imag e: dis comfort, hilarity, a nd b oredom. These p ictures attempt t o capture a n exp erience o f being in a body in the presence of another body in defiance of the flattening, abstracting, a nd stillin g effect of t he p hotograph. These w orks exp lore t he tension between experience and image by taking a different route through the image. Photography a nd t he p hotographic co ndition a re t herefore t hreaded through Hamilton’s work, but there remains a tension between photography and lived experience. Photography is a supplement to Hamilton’s work, and for other installation works like Hamilton’s, which are interested in va rious modes of direct bodily experience. These works produce their own supplements in the form of photographic archives and catalogs, which circulate in the networks of the international art market and provide symbolic status. The photographs of these pieces serve as documentation as well as providing an unacknowledged support for these works in an expanding art world. Bodily experience is made the explicit subject matter of this work precisely because it is set off by these photographic images. Hamilton’s body of work is one of many that reveal a dialog between picture and experience in installation art. Although these kinds of works do not incorporate photographic archives, in an effort to deal with the ephemerality of these pieces, they inevitably produce such archives through the documentation of the works. Hamilton’s haunting installation of charcoal in the picture is still highlights the relationship between image and experience. Hamilton wrote, “For me a central experience is the twining of the collective and horizontal body overhead to the vertical singular shadow image of one’s body in the work — this can be documented but is something that when you experience it is central to the structure and meaning of the project.”6

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This is not a new preoccupation for Hamilton but goes back to some of her earliest professional work. Hamilton began her undergraduate education in 1974, at St. Lawrence University, a liberal arts school, but then transferred to Ohio State University and then to the University of Kansas where she trained as a w eaver. She graduated with a M aster of Fine Ar ts degree in s culpture from Yale University in 1985. 7 In graduate school, Hamilton began making room-sized sculptural installations characterized by visual distortion. Her first major installation was room in pursuit of a position (1983) where cockeyed and fragmented bits of furniture were scattered across the ceiling, floor, and walls of a room. The piece played with viewing positions and perspective. Hamilton had an interest in photography and the way the photograph renders the body, or parts of it, an object. She used photographs of her own body to create sculptures that rendered her experience of her body uncanny. This relationship between body, object, and image was explored in formal terms in Hamilton’s series of studio photographs later called the body object series. Hamilton dressed herself with objects such as shoes, branches, or a door. In these images, the object and the artist’s body are joined, confusing the division between subject/object, self, and other in the image that results. In makin g t hese imag es, Hamilton s aid, she r ealized she wa nted t o no t represent the experience but instead make the experience be her w ork. She was encouraged by David von Schlegell in Yale University’s sculpture department t o lo ok a t p erformance as a n addi tion t o her w ork.8 Soo n a fter, she made the piece suitably positioned, often described as “the toothpick suit.” In this piece, Hamilton wore a suit bristling with toothpicks and stood for hours in a do orway. The suit activated the space a round her a nd changed the encounter with other indi viduals w ho approached her, as H amilton did no t interact with them but rather offered herself as an object of the viewer’s gaze. Joan S imon p oints out t his connection b etween t he body object ser ies and suitably positioned and Hamilton’s later use of performers who also are instructed not to interact with viewers but to behave as if absorbed in their own activities. S he s oon b egan makin g mo re r oom-sized in stallations t hat involved tremendous amounts of various kinds of material piled on floors and tables, and adhered to walls and other surfaces. In the late 1980s, Hamilton’s installations expanded to include several interacting elements and grew somatically intense. The installation also often included a performer who buried his hand in sand, sanded mirrors, or other

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simple activities. The environments were richly textured and often visually stark, including single figures or objects in vast fields of material. She also began using the “attendants” in t he work. These were volunteers who spent all day performing a manual task, such as knitting or sanding objects in the installation. In the late 1990s, Hamilton’s work shifted to pieces in which the viewer was the only human presence. Notably, in 1999, she was chosen as the U.S. representative at the Venice Biennale and constructed myein, an elaborate installation of many parts, such as a rac k of knotted handkerchiefs in the courtyard and a mottled glass wall. The installation resembled an empty stage set in w hich pink powder fell from the ceiling in t he U.S. Pavilion in Venice and dusted Braille that was embossed on the wall. After this project, Hamilton’s work became simpler, relying on single devices, such as at hand (2002), where custom-made machines mounted in ceiling beams picked up and dropped papers, which fluttered to the floor, a feature she later repeated for corpus at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, in 2003–2004. It was the viewer’s experience of these strange but absorbing spaces that became the heart of Hamilton’s work. At the same time, she co nsidered the photographs of these spaces to be important but subordinate to this aspect.

Studying Experience Experience and the related ideas of participation, immersion, and spectacle have been a part of art discourse and of ephemeral artworks, such as installations, since the 1960s. Art writers describe experience as valuable. It is seen as transformative, as in vigorating, as s omething t hat puts vie wers in co mmand of their surroundings and senses. For instance, installation-type work includes and activates viewers’ and the artwork’s space. As their bodies and the exhibition space are included in the experience of the work, viewers are guided to reflect on the process of perception or experience. In this way, they are put in command of the experience and led to a new understanding of the work of art and their selves. Experience that contributes to the sense of self and shared experience is the foundation for group identity and community. Since the late eighteenth century undergoing experience has been considered the primary means of constructing the modern self.9 As an example of this modern sensibility, Craig Ireland p oints to t he late eig hteenth-century de velopment of t he Bildungs-

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roman, in which the novel’s protagonist undergoes a journey that causes the character to develop. The novel in this sense reflects modern experience. The self in modernity is subject to change and capable of integrating experience as an inherent process of its formation. The twentieth-century American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey in his book Art as E xperience used the art encounter as a wa y to examine experience in g eneral. Dewey des cribed exp erience as a d ynamic interaction between self and environment. He argued that all experiences resemble aesthetic experience insofar as they have a wholeness and integrity setting them off from the ordinary run of events. For Dewey, the subject could never be the same after undergoing an experience. Experience transforms the self.10 This idea is typical of modernist notions of self-formation. The aesthetic experience, for Dewey, becomes the ideal way to experience experience, so to speak, and to participate in the process of self-formation that is necessary to modernity. Hans-Robert Jauss writes, “To experience art is an excellent way in which to experience the alien ‘you’ in its otherness, and, thereby, in turn to have an enriched exp erience of one’s own ‘I.’”11 Martin Jay argues too that experience leaves changed the sense of self. “That is, an experience, however we define it, cannot simply duplicate the prior reality of the one who undergoes it, le aving him o r her p recisely as b efore; s omething must b e altered, something new must happen, to make the term meaningful.”12 In this sense, experience is something that disrupts the horizon of expectation and is thus able to offer new perspectives on old ideas and social practices. This characterization of experience taken more broadly can be seen as the foundation for social change, and other theorists have based their work on these ideas. Craig Ireland points to E. P. Thompson’s appeal to common experience in the formation of a group consciousness (or in Thom pson’s case, working-class consciousness) as a foundation for political action. Thom pson criticized a bstract t heorizing a nd t urned t o e veryday exp erience as a wa y to resist dominant middle-class culture. His political ideas derived from his work as a hist orian who examined the history of social and work practices among t he English working class. Thompson argued t hat t he difference of working-class experience would provide members of this class the ground from which to question and criticize dominant culture.13 One of the points that Craig Ireland makes about E. P. Thom pson’s appeal to exp erience is t hat immediate exp erience is s een as s omething t hat falls

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outside of language. The body becomes the foundation from which an “outside” of ideology can be formed. The problem with this argument, as Ireland points out, is that it reifies the body, takes it outside of history and culture and naturalizes differences. From this ground an alternative politics and agency can be formed, a stance that has the potential to be liberating or coercive with regard to who can be included in the group and how the characteristics of the group are defined. Movements including feminism, civil rights, and postcolonial politics have emphasized the importance of the difference in p ersonal experience of the group for defining and articulating community identity and a sense of political agency.14 Ireland argues that this understanding of experience came to the fore in the 1970s. It informed subaltern politics, such as the feminist movement (“the personal is political”) and other cultural phenomena of the 1970s from the “back to the land movement” to the reemergence of handicraft as a form of resistance to industrialized, capitalist culture. At the same time, the appeal t o exp erience in t he 1960s a nd 1970s sug gests t hat exp erience had become a c urious and interesting topic, as if t here was no lo nger certainty about what experience is.

Art as Experience Perhaps i t is b ecause o f t he uncer tainty co ncerning exp erience t hat i t has become a prominent aspect of art practice and exhibition since the 1970s. As in the social movements, we can see the notion of experience appearing in feminist art practices in t he 1970s w here the appeal to personal experience is subject matter for art as well as the means for effecting social change. Discussing and displaying shared experience was a primary strategy in the feminist practices of Suzanne L acy, L eslie L abowitz, Judy Chicag o, a nd other artists. It is the central tenet as well of more recent community and activistoriented “new genre public art.” It has als o been a significant aspect of the group of practices designated “relational aesthetics” as well as installation art, as Claire Bishop argues. Art institutions can provide a unique experience in the form of performances or installation art. Writers in the field of art criticism over the twentieth century have valued some types of experiences in art practice more than others. For instance, in his canonical 1939 essay “AvantGarde and Kitsch,” Clement Greenberg makes the case for valuing aesthetic

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experience over the experience of everyday life. He argued that fine art must maintain its autonomy from the experiences of a degraded ca pitalist kitsch culture. I n do ing s o, t he aest hetic exp erience p rovided b y fine a rt ena bles criticism of modern culture in general. Unlike the encounter with an everyday object, the encounter with a modernist painting, according to Greenberg, was a purely visual and instantaneous experience, distinct from any other experience in daily life. Painting, as a visual medium that emphasizes its own material limits, must address itself to the e yes. M ichael F ried, G reenberg’s p rotégé, des cribed t his exp erience o f modernist painting as “presentness.” “Presentness is grace,” he wrote famously at the end o f his ess ay 1967 Artforum article “Art and Objecthood,” underscoring the sense that aesthetic experience in modernist art should be transcendent and specific. However, in modernist painting, aesthetic experience is visual, and it addresses a dis embodied sub ject. Modernist cr iticism f ollows a tradi tion in Western culture in w hich vision has b een seen as t he highest of the senses. Having no dir ect co ntact wi th i ts ob ject, visio n has tradi tionally b een r egarded as corresponding to the intellect, reason, or spirit.15 The idealization of vision filtered into modernist art criticism of the midcentury, which, thus, reinforced the historical hierarchy of the senses. Later critics of modernist art and criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Brian O’Doherty and Minimalist sculptor Robert Morris, describe the modernist aesthetic experience not as transcendent but as lacking. It is an experience in which vision is isolated from the other senses and cut off from the body. O’Doherty, as we have seen, argued that the modernist art gallery is constructed to deny any sense but t hat o f t he e ye a nd, in do ing s o, mak es s eeing a n in tellectual ac tivity rather than a holistic organic activity. In the 1977 ess ay “The Present Tense of Space” Robert Morris noted that sculpture in t he 1960s a nd 1970s was distin guished by an interest in dir ect experience t hat was b ound u p in spa tial a nd t emporal p erception. Morris describes the work of artists such as Richard Serra and Robert Irwin as being part o f ne w spatial a rts, w hich a re a rts o f t he p resent t ense.16 The spatial installation-type w ork als o produced ne w cr iteria f or a rt in t he 1970s. H e argues t hat t his work is dir ected at t he subject in t he mo de of “I,” t he s elf caught up in the immediate moment of perception or lived experience. The spatial experience for this subject is infused with a sense of continuous time

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and is framed by the limits of the body. Morris separates this “I” mode from “me,” which is a sense of self that forms in reflection on experience in judgment, in language, or in memory. With a typical modernist painting, where the viewer in theory grasps the static object immediately, the distance between the “I” and t he “me” mo de is q uite short. In t he ne w spatial work, Morris says, the distance between one and the other is much greater. The encounter with this type of art, he implies, takes more work. It requires something from the viewer and offers something to the viewer in return, in terms of the richness of the experience. Mary Miss and Suzanne Harris’s work also seem to be based on this idea of the importance of direct experience. For her pa rt, Rosalind Krauss describes the subject that exp eriences the Minimalist art as differing from the biographical subject. The Minimalist subject is composed of distinct, intense moments of bodily perception that are merely strung together but do not necessarily develop or become integrated. These in tense mo ments o f p erception co uld p rovide t he gr ound f or r esistance to experience in ind ustrialized culture, as K rauss says, but she wa rns they also describe the “postmodern” fragmented subject that is the product of late industrialization. Krauss goes on to draw the connection between experience of the Minimalist object and broader social conditions: And thus this is, we could say, compensatory, an act of reparations to a subject whose everyday experience is one of increasing isolation, reification, specialization, a subject who lives under the conditions of advanced industrial culture as an increasingly instrumentalized being. It is to this subject that Minimalism, in an act of resistance to the serializing, stereotyping, and banalizing of commodity production, holds out the promise of some instant of bodily plenitude in a gesture that we recognize as deeply aesthetic.17

Mary Ann Doane says something similar about contingency. The contingency of the lived moment represents a kind of freedom in the face of structured and rationalized time in ind ustrial capitalist culture. Other artists in the 1960s expanded the notion of aesthetic experience. Allan Kaprow thought the participants’ experience of his environments, Happenings, and activities was central to his work. He studied Dewey, making notes in the margins of Art as E xperience.18 He seemed to read Dewey as sug gesting that quotidian experience could be aesthetic experience. Kaprow’s ritualized activities and

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environments were intended to focus the participant’s attention on the everyday sensation, the simple gesture, and the routine task. As Kaprow wrote in 1958 in “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” he believed artists of the 1960s would make the viewer preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be the vastness of FortySecond Street. . . . Not only will these bold creators show us, as if for the first time, the world we have always had about us but ignored, but they will disclose entirely unheard-of happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies; seen in store windows and on the streets; and sensed in dreams and horrible accidents.19

In this article, Kaprow sees the artist as revitalizing the viewer’s perception of t he e veryday w orld t hrough distinc t exp eriences. Cla mbering t hrough Kaprow’s hot tires on a summer day in Yard (1961) or shuffling through the newspapers a nd c hicken wir e t o c hoose a f resh o r fak e apple in An Ap ple Shrine (1960), the viewer, the artist hoped, would rediscover a childlike awareness. For Kaprow, the art experience goes beyond the aesthetic sphere and transforms t he vie wer’s a nd t he a rtist’s e veryday exp erience. K aprow’s description of the subject’s transformation of perception rhyme Dewey’s notion of experience as a way of shaping the self. Experience is a t erm t hat has b een applied, t herefore, in ma ny different contexts in American art from the discourse on modernist painting to the reference to phenomenology in minimal a rt and performance. Claire Bishop’s book Installation Art continues this discussion by enumerating the varieties of exp erience p roduced b y in stallations o f va rious s orts a nd t he vie wing subjects they construct. Minimalism, especially Robert Morris’s writings, has clearly been influential in t hese revisions of the notion of aesthetic experience. The influence of Minimalism would also help to transform the nature of exhib ition spaces a fter t he 1960s. Ros alind K rauss des cribes a co nversation she had with Thomas Krens about the moment he conceived of Mass MoCA, the grand, transformed industrial space in North Adams, Massachusetts, which showcases installation art. Krens thought of renovating the site for a museum after having seen a large gallery in G ermany converted from a factory space. Krauss’s anecdote is telling because it says a great deal about the exhibition context for installations in t he 1980s, 1990s, a nd 2000s. A c-

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cording to Krauss, Krens said that the small-scale museum that tells the story of art history was obsolete precisely because of Minimalism’s demands on the viewer and the space of the exhibition site, which would forego history, in the name of a kind of intensity of experience, an aesthetic charge that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is now radically spatial, the model for which, in Krens’s own account, was in fact, Minimalism. It is Minimalism, says Krens in relation to his own revelation, that has reshaped the way we, as late twentieth century viewers, look at art; the demands we now put on it; our need to experience it along with its interaction with the space in which it exists; our need to have a cumulative, serial, crescendo towards the intensity of this experience; our need to have more and at a larger scale.20

Krauss’s example for this type of exhibition space is a M inimalist exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville in Paris, in which the redesigned space and the interaction of the works (the light cast from Dan Flavin’s light sculptures) with this newly grandiose and neutralized space are central, rather than the works themselves. However, Krauss goes on to connect these sites to a shift in t he art market in w hich museums become like corporate entities. She points to Krens using the term “museum industry,” which was p erhaps an unfamiliar idea in 1990 but is now commonplace. The industrialization of the museum, she says, will require “the increased control of resources in the form of art objects that can cheaply and efficiently be entered into circulation. Further, in relation to the effective marketing of this product, there will be the requirement of larger and larger surface[s] over which to sell product[s] in order to increase what Krens himself calls ‘market share.’”21 Krauss is referring to the franchising of art institutions, such as t he Guggenheim Museum. Installation art has b ecome a do minant medium in t hese exhibition venues. Art historian Kate Mondloch notes in relation to media-based installations that the audience member who can walk through an installation and “window-shop” can determine the time o f viewing, making this one of the appealing aspects of installation for contemporary audiences.22

Contemporary Installation Art as the Art of Experience There are many examples of installations that emphasize viewer’s direct experience of the work and are exhibited in these sorts of exhibition venues. In

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fact, one could argue that, because they focus on direct experience of various sorts, all of the pieces that Claire Bishop discusses in Installation Art: A Critical History could be included in this category. Almost any work that focuses on bodily experience, that engages more than the visual sense, or that transforms a space into an immersive environment would participate in this strain of installation art. These are works of art that focus on internal, present-tense experience. The following short survey of these works falls into three basic categories that crystallize different aspects of experience. The first are installations that focus on immersive materiality and on engaging the viewer’s senses of touch, smell, and even taste. These works focus on sensation in the present. Some of these pieces seek to avoid the domination of vision in Western culture and have their roots in works from the 1960s, such as Allan Kaprow’s and Hélio Oiticica’s. The s econd category includes works t hat s eek to engage t he observer in r eflection on the processes of perception, such as sig ht or sound. These works ultimately derive from the sculptural practices of the 1960s and 1970s r elated t o M inimalism, suc h as Rob ert M orris a nd Ric hard S erra’s large-scale site-specific pieces. A third strain of work focuses on the materiality of objects and their relationship to the human senses to evoke memories and human experience. These works focus on how sensation helps in recollection of the past. The materiality of the work is intended to produce an atmosphere of charged emotion, such as the installations of Joseph Beuys and other artists who use materials symbolically. One strain of work focusing on the senses and materiality comes out of Latin America in the 1960s. This would include work by Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark who emphasized direct bodily engagement with the work. A more recent example would be Ernesto Neto’s large-scale, soft, s culptural installations. Or iginally f rom Brazil, Neto makes work t hat draws on t he Neoconcretist sculptures of Clark and Oiticica. His work is o ften composed of soft, stretchy, polyamide polyps, which are hung from the ceiling and then filled with various materials, such as aromatic spices. The sculptures suggest an organic, living body and engage not only the visual sensation but also the sense of touch and smell. One well-known piece titled Walking in Venus Blue Cave was an entire room through which viewers could walk, exploring with their hands the fleshy orifices, and feeling the polyps stuffed with Styrofoam,

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spices, or other materials. Like Hamilton’s, Neto’s work seeks to immerse and to engage the viewer’s senses. Tara Donovan’s sculptural installations could also be included in this category. Although D onovan do es not f ocus on en gaging t he s ense of s ound or smell, her installations create a dramatic tactile space by the accumulation of simple materials such as plastic straws or pieces of tar paper (Transplanted, 2003). These materials are organized in a r epetitive pattern that makes the material appear to be a gr owing organism. The work often requires a c lose look before the observer understands the materials being used, and for this reason, they are difficult to photograph. The large-scale works of Anish Kapoor have a similar materiality. Kapoor’s pieces are often made of stretched cloth or carefully polished metal walls that create unsettling distortions. It is difficult to understand these works visually. Concave surfaces appear to be convex, while punctures in a wall seem to extend to infinity. In Past, Present, Future (2006) exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, onequarter of a sphere composed of a waxy, red substance was raked by a circular blade that over time created scars in the perfect circular form. Kapoor’s work stages materiality and frames the act of perception on a grand scale. Another type of installation work derives more directly from Minimalism, especially the large-scale works of the 1970s, suc h as Rob ert Morris’s maze pieces and Richard Serra’s ellipses and arcs. All of these pieces are about the experience of space a nd sensation in t he “present tense.” An e arly example would be the work of James Turrell whose installations make light seem palpable. In a well-known series of works, a viewer enters a gallery to see a large, brightly colored, practically glowing rectangle mounted on the far wall. However, when one approaches the rectangle, the space suddenly drops back, and the viewer realizes that this is a n opening into another colorful light-filled chamber. The “mist installations” of Ann Veronica Janssens, such as Whose Afraid of Blue, Red, and Yellow f rom 2001, a re p erhaps the des cendants of Turrell’s exercise in illusionism. In this piece, the artist constructed a roomsized installation and created a colored space for viewers to move through by filling the room with smoke and then lighting it through colored filters. The light installations of Spencer Finch are another more conceptual example of this kind o f work. Finch tries to re-create his exp erience of light in cer tain locations, such as L os Alamos, New Mexico, in Blue (sky over Los Alamos,

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New Mexico, 5/5/00, m orning effect). In this piece, he us es electric bulbs to re-create the effect of natural light for his viewers. Japanese sound and installation artist Ryoji Ikeda strikes a slightly different tone in his light pieces. In Spectra i i, Ikeda made a w ork that recalls Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor f rom t he e arly 1970s. I n t his p iece, Ik eda invited a n obs erver into a darkened room, which turns out to be a co rridor. Blinded by the darkness, the sometimes-frightened viewer is confronted by a high-pitched tone that is connected to a strobe light. As the viewer’s eyes adjust, a red laser appears at the end of the corridor, which the viewer can choose to walk toward or not. More strictly sculptural versions of these kinds of works include the large Torqued Ellipses by Richard Serra located at the Dia Art Foundation’s Beacon New York institution. Viewers must navigate these large-scale pieces and pay attention to both their perceptions of how the works mold space and create subtle variations in a ir pressure and s ound and t he way lig ht plays on t he rusting met al a nd p roduces shado ws a nd hig hlights. I n J ulianne S wartz’s work of architectural intervention Line Drawing, she punched round openings through the walls of the space. Swartz then used fans and mirrors to alter the perception of the space.23 Her work derives from Michael Asher’s alterations of galleries and many of the pieces that were exhibited in t he Rooms exhibition, such as b y Gordon Matta-Clark and Mary Miss or by Alice Aycock. Certain works by Carsten Höller function in t he same way, including his metal slide pieces, which participants are allowed to slide down to experience the thrill of speed and gravity. All of these works rely on the observer’s presence and experience of the space, as Bishop says. A final category of installation art would be works that use space and materials to refer not to the present but to the past. I n these pieces, sensuous materials are employed to evoke memory, human experiences, or stories. I would include Ann Hamilton’s work in this category, along with artists such as the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo and French artist Christian Boltanski. For instance, in Salcedo’s work, memory is concentrated in the form of dense sculptural works that employ a postminimal sculptural language. Using old wooden furniture that has been filled with concrete, Salcedo evokes not only the private interior of the home and the family but also the density of human bodies. Gathered together in large installations, these pieces refer to the effects of the civil war in C olombia. More recently, Salcedo has made w orks that utilize chairs to fill up architectural voids, such as her dramatic contribu-

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tion to the 2003 I stanbul Biennial, where she us ed thousands of old chairs piled a few stories high to fill an empty lot between two apartment buildings in Istanbul. Christian Boltanski uses objects to evoke a sense of dread and mystery. In Boltanski’s Les H abits de F rançois C , he p hotographed i tems o f c hildren’s clothing in black and white, as if they were pieces of evidence. He then placed the photographs in deep boxes and mounted them on the wall in a grid formation.24 The ob jects a re unif orm a nd gr im a nd sug gest a nonymous a nd premature death — an allusion to the Holocaust. In another piece from the mid-1980s, ti tled Chases High S chool, B oltanski re-photographed t he individual faces o f students from a J ewish high school class that graduated in 1931 in Vienna. He enlarged the images, made them blurry, and rendered the sitters remote, setting them up under desk lamps that should illuminate but that obscure the images instead. These were then set on top of old tin biscuit boxes.25 The viewer will know nothing more about the people in the photographs. The viewer is thus prevented from making any connection with the people in t he image. This work relates to Boltanski’s earlier archive-like inventory pieces and his general fascination with the question of individuality and death in mass culture. Joseph Beuys influenced all of these works, which use symbolically or culturally charged materials to convey ideas about spirituality and experience. Ann Hamilton’s work falls into this last group of installation art. All of these works focus on perception and experience in the present tense for individual bodies. They seem to elude photographic representation. However, it is in the attempt to grasp the present tense, Mary Ann Doane argues, that the archival impulse is born.

Memory, Experience, and Historical Images in Hamilton’s Work Ann Hamilton’s interest in experience is due in part to her observation that the way we deal with objects and materials in everyday life has changed radically in mo dernity. She thinks of consumer culture as contributing to a decline in knowledge. Anni Albers talks about this predicament in her book On Designing. She writes about the fact that there is so much schizophrenic behavior in society because

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we don’t have contact with materials from a raw to finished state. In the kind of work we do every day, we engage midslot in something, from the way that we buy food to the way that we push paper around.26

More recently, Hamilton has written, We live in a world run by technologies that are invisible to us, a world in which materials are often disassociated from their source — in a world where the coat on our back no longer links in our mind to the fleece of a sheep. I am interested in how the tactile knowledge of material processes and systems remain relevant to our cultural imagination, in how embodied forms of knowledge pass forward without being categorized as anachronistic or nostalgic.27

Like Robert Morris, Ann H amilton has t hought carefully about the reasons she mak es art focused on b odily exp erience. As the quotation above indicates, her interest in the body comes from a response to everyday experience in a media-s aturated a nd t echnology-dependent en vironment. H er work tries to enrich a viewer’s experience by encouraging them to focus on how a nd w hat w e p erceive t hrough t he five s enses. S everal o f Hamilton’s installations from 1988 through 1996 were constructed as intense, sensuous experiences in which the space buzzes with organic and mechanical rhythms. Viewers are invited to be aware of their perceptions and sensations in these spaces. Imagine crossing the threshold of mantle at the Miami Art Museum (figure 3.1). The artist sits in a chair sewing the sleeves on wool coats. In the same room, shortwave radios broadcast news from around the globe and pungent flowers wilt on a long table. In this space, the observer is immediately aware of simultaneous movements, sounds, and smells, and is challenged to be attentive to these perceptions. In mantle, as viewers linger in the space, they attend to the smell of the flowers as they dry imperceptibly and collapse and to the quiet, steady rhythm of the artist sewing sleeves amidst the crackle from the radios. Hamilton’s work spans the gap between the simplifying aspect of photographic vision and the full-body immersive experience of her complex installations. I will argue in this section that Hamilton’s work recalls, perhaps as a distant collective memory, the moment when modern methods of production s upplanted cra ft o r wo rkshop p roduction b y me ans o f p hotographic technology. It is t he s ame era in hist ory t hat t he p hotographic im pulse is

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F I G U R E 3 . 1 A nn Hamilton, mantle. Miami Art Museum, Miami, Florida, April 2–June 7, 1998. Materials: about sixty thousand fresh-cut flowers; eight tables (each 32 feet x 6 inches x 6 inches), connected to a length of 48; eleven various model shortwave radio receivers; shelf (72 feet long x 12 inches deep, mounted 13 feet above floor); broadcast voice; thirty-three 4 x 4 inch speakers; white-painted wood and wicker chair; figure; steel block; sewing implements; thirty-three gray, blue, and black wool coats.

Photo credit: Thibault Jeanson. Courtesy of the Ann Hamilton Studio.

born. This hist orical de velopment is st aged met aphorically in t he in stallations in which Hamilton employed an “attendant” to perform different kinds of work in t he space. As we will s ee, these attendants embody the moment when t he cra ftsperson was tra nsformed in to t he w orker via p hotographic methods of study. It is an activity that not only took place in the past but also takes place everyday when the consumption of images on screens displaces the use of the whole body and its other senses. These workers are placed within the context of sensually complex spaces. For Hamilton, t he attempt t o stimulate all o f t he s enses is mo tivated by a desire to produce an immersive experience for the viewer that engages all the senses including vision. Hamilton’s work invites the viewer to surrender to the installation environment, to become absorbed in its surfaces via the sense of sight, smell, touch, and even taste. The walls of her installations are often covered wi th all s orts o f edib le ma terials, co rncobs, co rnmeal, a nd h usks; sweet-smelling beeswax; eucalyptus; smoked pigskin; honey; bourbon-infused water; and mussel shells. The white, clean surface of the gallery space is complicated and made sensual, inviting a connection with the viewer’s body. The architecture is “embodied” by engaging the viewer’s body through all of the senses.

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Hamilton, t hroughout her ca reer, has b een in terested in p roducing a n embodied architecture that calls f or a r esponse from the viewer’s body and responds to it as w ell. S een in psy choanalytic terms, it is a n exp erience of bodily in timacy t hat r ecalls t he infa nt’s deep co nnection t o t he mo ther’s body. Although Hamilton does not describe the work as strictly feminist, her installations and interest in the senses share some characteristics with feminist a rtistic strategies, f ollowing t he t heories o f Luce I rigaray a nd Helène Cixous, as in I rigaray’s This Sex, Which Is Not One and Cixous’s “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays that emphasize the sensation of touch, smell, or hearing rather than sight as strategies for honoring the feminine. For Hamilton, this has taken the form of dislodging vision from its seat in the skull and confusing it with other senses. For instance, in the picture is s till, Hamilton used a tiny camera that she had had specially designed to film a photograph with her fingers. As one watches the video, it is as if o ne is b oth seeing and caressing the image at the same time. Her videos often conflate the senses in this way. Her pieces reawaken latent bodily memories in such a way that the viewer can be both seduced and disturbed. Hamilton’s in terest in b ody kno wledge is inf ormed b y her tra ining as a weaver in the 1970s.28 For feminists in the 1970s, craft was a way to honor an unacknowledged art practiced by women in t he past. B y practicing craft, i t was possible to recover the experiences of women in the past and to include them in the history of art. For Hamilton, agency is epitomized by the act of making. And it is t he act of making that opens the subject to knowledge of material experience. Hamilton’s work seems to follow this logic. Hamilton’s interest in making has its roots in the work of artists such as Jackie Winsor, whose emphasis on handwork at a heroic scale set her apart from the Minimalists with whom she is o ften compared. In Bound Square (1972), Winsor recycled old rope and used its fiber to bind the ends of four logs together in the ancient construction strategy of wrapping. The piece, although simple, took hundreds of hours to produce. Anna Chave connects Winsor’s interest in this type of work to the ingenuity she observed on the part of her mother who raised her children in Newfoundland and built a house, cooked, canned, and used all of the skills required to survive in a rugged rural setting.29 Winsor’s sculpture reflected her respect for labor and, as Chave notes, especially the unremunerated labor associated with women.

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In her 1991 interview, Hamilton discussed her own interest in hand labor, which she connects to a neglected type of body knowledge that has been lost in a society where the primary gesture is the pushing of buttons or touching screens.30 New technologies and new types of work practices have changed our engagement with the material world. A similar dismay accompanied the change wrought in social and bodily practices by factory production. As the Marxist theorist Georg Lukács explains it in History and Class Consciousness, the object produced by the factory is not the product of an organic work process where a single hand is involved from start to finish but instead the result of many different automated processes. In the factory product, the traces of labor are erased, as t he worker flicks his ha nd over the product as it moves down the line. Walter Benjamin relates the same movement to the flick of the gambler’s wrist, or that of flipping on a light, striking a match, or pushing a button on a camera — the gesture produces no real experiences for the person w ho p erforms i t. Theodor A dorno a nd B enjamin a rgued t hat, in t he transition to modernity, experience was str ipped to those essential features necessary for functioning in an industrialized world.31 As in the movement of a s econd ha nd on a c lock, unrelated a nd identical in stants acc umulate with each automated gesture. Factory time is fixed into moments, not stories. Time is rationalized in modernity. No knowledge or experience is activated in the motion, as push-button technology circumvents the need for embodied knowledge. E. P. Thompson in his vivid accounts of weavers’ lives describes what advocates of the “craftsman ideal” believed they were losing in industrialization.32 Thompson’s accounts focuses on a moment of transformation when handweaving was r eplaced b y w eaving mills in En gland. H is wr iting p rovides glimpses of a w ork practice that allowed enough flexibility and leftover energy for collecting, writing poetry, making music, and gardening. While sitting at the loom, a weaver could prop up a book and read or talk with fellow workers. Thompson’s imag es co njure dr eams o f p reindustrial co ntentment and security. He gathered anecdotes of weavers’ reactions to factory production and concluded, “They resented, first, the discipline; the factory bell or hooter; the time-keeping which over rode ill health, domestic arrangements, or the choice of more varied occupations.”33 There was a desir e in the nineteenth century to establish a movement to return to a system of production

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based on medieval practices of craft and guild o rganization and these tendencies continue into the twenty-first century. These advocates of the “craftsman ideal,” as the scholar Eileen B oris calls it, such as members of the arts and crafts movement, s et up workshops and s chools to teach s oon-to-beforgotten met hods of handicraft.34 Ar tists and cr itics, such as t he English artist William Morris and critic John Ruskin, hoped to undo t he alienation that occurred in the industrial production of commodities. The “craftsman ideal” continues in the twentieth and twenty-first century. It is a r eaction against capitalist “one-dimensionality.” The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse warned against a society of one-dimensional men, by which he meant a society of those trained with one or two specialized skills in order to fit into an integrated system of industrial production.35 Craft and hand labor were perceived by some to be a way of getting outside these conditions. The ha ndmade p roduct r epresents t he p ossibility o f r esistance t o modern capitalist culture. E. P. Thompson wrote his piece “The Weavers” in the e arly 1960s in B ritain. I n t he 1960s in t he United S tates, t here was a movement, with motivations similar to that of the arts and crafts movement, to return to craft-based forms of production as a way of escaping 1960s corporate a nd ind ustrial c ulture. And t hese ide as co ntinue in t he d iy (do i t yourself) movement that views the ability to make things by hand as a way to resist the control of everyday life imposed by corporate culture. Hamilton is ca reful t o distin guish her w ork f rom t he desir e t o valo rize craft as artists did in t he 1970s. Hamilton’s installations validate the process of makin g wi thout p roducing m uch in t he wa y o f lo ng-lasting ha ndmade objects. Instead, in Hamilton’s work, the process of making is opened up and transformed into its various experiential modes: material sensations, traces, and actions. It shifts the interest from a permanent object to the components of an experience that, perhaps, disrupts everyday experience in a push-button technology culture. In this way, it seems to be connected to Doane’s idea of the contingent in modernity. A primary difficulty for Hamilton’s works lies in co nveying an experience of craft and the body knowledge to an observing viewer without asking the viewer to make something. The artist initially tried to solve this problem by framing t he g estures o f ha nd la bor. Hamilton’s la rge-scale in stallations o f the early 1990s, w hich often involved the gathering and assembling of large amounts of material, also marshaled large groups of volunteers. They nailed

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metal tags to floors, folded shirts, and sewed silk panels. Hamilton’s installations, like Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, were accumulations of large amounts of hand labor. Even the picture is still involved the work of many volunteers tying and hanging branches of charcoal by hand from the ceiling of the space. The tasks to which Hamilton set her v olunteers were valuable for the artist because they engaged her participants in the process of making. These aest hetic g estures t ake t he f orms of t he w orker’s repetitive movements in t he installations, of gestural marks left in t he heavily worked surfaces, and of video images of hands knitting, sewing, and so forth. In Hamilton’s installations, when an attendant stages a gesture, it is integrated with the working body. The defenders of the craftsman ideal claim that craft production enables a type of knowledge and an experience of the material world that is lost in machine production by engaging the body more fully in work. The holistic understanding of materials and processes that a craftsman knows is reduced to a g esture or a s eries of simple gestures in ass embly-line production. This process is figured in the image of the simple work diagram in which a series of movements is reduced to a set of visual signs: a two-dimensional image. Bruce Kaiper describes the result: “Instead the engineer includes us [the workers] as a pa rt of the construction problem to be abstracted. Our movements including our skill, the time we take and our work relations are made into symbols, signs, mathematical equations and lines.”36 The gesture sets off a whole series of minute, complicated motions in the machinery into which the hand’s gesture disappears. The trace of the hand is reduced to a click or flick. In the factory-produced object, the traces o f labor and the time i t took to make are illegible. Plastic and metal do not accept the trace of a unique hand. The flick of the worker’s hand over the product takes, ideally, only a moment, and the trace of one hand working over the entire body of a commodity was replaced with the movement of many hands. Industrial production fragments the making process so that individual workers no longer see the product of their efforts. Instead, their gestures are scientifically measured and specific to the task at hand, as this is the most efficient means of production. In this process, the body of the worker is integrated into the work process. The reduction of the work gesture to a click immediately calls to mind the reduction of bodily experience to image via the click of an opened camera

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shutter. And t his is partly how these more efficient processes of production came about. Frank B. Gilbreth, who was the pioneer of time-motion studies to improve the efficiency of workers in p roduction, studied the motion of workers via film and photographs. He did s o to break down t he complex movements of a work into clear units and then to choreograph the gestures of workers s o t hat t hey would accomplish t heir t asks in t he most efficient manner possible. Following the pioneering work of Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge earlier in the nineteenth century, he filmed workers doing their work against walls wi th a gr id painted on them and, using a sp ecially calibrated clock, he timed t heir movements. He also attached light to workers’ hands and set up a ca mera for long exposure, thereby attaining a co ntinuous line that could be viewed in three dimensions in a stereograph. He then devised ways to save movements and time. For instance, he t urned the lines o f the stereograph into static, wire models that workers could use to learn how to move. In his classic study of bricklayers, Gilbreth follows a procedure of carefully delineating all the variables that enter into efficient production.37 The y range from the “brawn” of the workman to his contentment and to the weight and size of his tools. He also studied the human body carefully and determined the easiest and most comfortable gestures for a worker to make in the process of his w ork. Gilbreth had gr eat concern for the b odily comfort of the workers. He advocated free food, good lighting, and frequent periods of rest for the most efficient work. But this comfort was intended to make easier the abstraction a nd integration o f a li ving b eing into t he p rocess o f mac hinebased factory assemblage to save money. Gilbreth aimed to make the human into a machine in t he best way possible. He studies the human body as if i t were a mac hine, making comparisons such as t he following, where he discusses a worker working on a machine and makes no distinction between the two b odies: “Motions sho uld b e o n t he f ore a nd a ft v ertical p lane passin g through the body. It is s o necessary to have the motions similar that often counterbalances a nd sp rings ca n b e in stalled t o r everse mo tion, t hus als o causing the hardest work to be done in the most convenient direction.”38 In Gilbreth’s films and photographs, we see workers seated at worktables or standing at workbenches. The camera is positioned so that it is possible to see the hands at work on the tabletop, which along with the walls, has b een

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carefully covered with a grid. Gilbreth placed a timer, his microchronometer, in the foreground of the film frame. It is b lack with white hands that turn continually as the worker works. Gilbreth constructed his promotional films with sequences of before and after the application of his methods. Before the methods are applied, the workers’ motions are halting and hesitant. After the application of his methods, in the newly brightened space, the workers’ hand motions are synthesized to the repetition and rhythm of the work. Ther e is no hesitation or fumbling to the gestures. In essence, the idiosyncrasy of the gesture, the worker’s individual attempt to adapt to the work environment, has been diminished, and the motion has been generalized and abstracted — a process of abstraction symbolized by the gridded photograph. The gesture becomes automatic and universal and requires a cer tain kind o f limited attentiveness on the part of the worker. This attentiveness seems different from what is required of the craftsman. Photography in this instance had an effect on the experience of everyday life for these workers. Gilbreth’s work is a perfect example of the way that Henri Bergson asserted that science attempts to capture the complexity of vital experience, thereby simplifying it. In the context of Hamilton’s artwork, the people that she calls t he “attendants” r epresent her ide al vie wers. These “attendants” a re t he silen t individuals who were put on display in her in stallations and performed simple tasks such as knitting, sanding mirrors, or sewing over the course of the exhibition. Hamilton’s term “attendant” means “one who pays attention.” The poet Rainer Maria Rilke regarded attention as the remains of a “lost ideal of artisanal absorption in work, now exiled to the margins of a mechanized and routinized world.”39 Authentic experience from Rilke’s perspective is one component of now-lost artisanal culture. For Hamilton, attentive making can be the remnant of a collective experience that as an aesthetic experience approximates what has been lost in industrialization. Hamilton has said that the person w ho b est under stood her in stallation myein at t he Venice B iennale in 1999 was in fac t the museum guard who, while protecting the work, spent hours on end in t he space obs erving the subtle changes of light and movement. In the exhibition of their handwork, Hamilton frames the attentiveness that these workers brought to their tasks. It is a curious thing to put attentive labor on display in this way. Gilbreth’s photographic met hods mig ht s eem completely antithetical to Hamilton’s presentation of work by “attendants” because they drain the in-

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F I G U R E 3 . 2 A nn Hamilton, tropos. DIA Center for the Arts, New York, October 7, 1993–June 19, 1994. M aterials: translucent industrial glass windows, gravel topped with concrete, horsehair, table, chair, electric buren, books. Recorded voice: audiotape, audiotape player, speakers. Photo credit: Thibault Jeanson. Courtesy of the Ann Hamilton Studio.

dividual experience of work, abstract it, and generalize it. However, there are remarkable visual simila rities between the two. “Attendants” have been included in ten of Hamilton’s pieces since 1989. An attendant is often standing at a table, seated at a table, or on a stool doing a repetitive motion. Their work, as in Gilbreth’s films, is presented for the inspection of the observer without acknowledging t heir p resence. F or in stance, t he mir rors t o b e w orked in aleph are lifted from the worker’s left side, sanded until they are useless, and then moved to the right. The same maneuver occurs in each of Gilbreth’s factory studies, such as one scene where a woman worker stands at a table and polishes glycerin bars. It is clear that Hamilton’s attendant’s motions have also been ca refully s cripted; t hey a re no t hal ting o r hesi tating b ut smo oth a nd repetitive. Like the factory worker’s, their work is an abstraction of the pro-

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FIGURE

3 . 3 F rank Gilbreth, Lillian B. Gilbreth in Motion Study. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth

Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution.

cess of production, and their work has been photographed and filmed, albeit for catalogs and c d -r o ms. And in the process of moving, Hamilton’s attendants would look more like Gilbreth’s workers, whose motion, with the help of the camera, has b een better integrated into the overall system of factory production and whose bodies have been assimilated to the working rhythm of machines. Hamilton’s installations of the 1990s do not simply yearn for the fullness of a preindustrial mode of production. Instead, they allow for a play of tension between “craftsman ideal” and factory labor rendered efficient by means of photographic technologies. Both aspects of the history of labor are evoked in these works. Hamilton’s pieces, just like the former factory spaces in w hich many of them take place, hark back precisely to that moment in the late nineteenth cen tury w hen ha nd la bor was dis appearing in t he face o f mac hine

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labor, when photography enabled scientists and artists to analyze the body and its rhythms. There is t herefore a co mplexity in H amilton’s work that is often ignored when it is characterized as a return to preindustrial experience. The question of relationship between image and experience is referenced historically via the history of labor evoked in Hamilton’s installations. Hamilton’s work naturally responds to some of the spaces in w hich it has been exhibited. These are often the old industrial spaces of cities taken over when industrial economies faded or changed. In the late 1960s, Reesa Goldberg has noted, for instance, that the space of exhibition for avant-garde art in New York was transferred from the intimate, home-like atmosphere of the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art to the industrial warehouses of marginal parts of the city that were found for alternative art spaces. 40 In these spaces, the artists used the materials they found left over from the buildings’ previous lives as small factories, or a disused school in the case of PS1. Hamilton’s work s eems to pick up on t he memories embedded in t he b ones of these buildings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Documenting Hamilton’s Work Many professional p hotographers have do cumented Hamilton’s w ork, but these imag es have ra rely co nveyed t he exp erience o f her spaces. And i t is important for these images to communicate the work accurately. For an installation artist in the last thirty years, photographs in magazines, in b ooks, in art history lectures, or on the World Wide Web signify the artist and represent a b ody of work in a g lobal context. Large-scale installations are also expensive to produce and often require institutional support, which is generated by publicity produced by such images. Hamilton’s work exemplifies the shift in the relationship of installation art to photography. Catalogs have accompanied many of Hamilton’s exhibitions, and she also has an archive of photographs of each installation that includes prints and negatives of her installations, although not every one of her pieces was documented in this manner. When discussing the documentation of her work and the catalogs that have been published, Hamilton points to budget and time constraints. Because installation art does not have the profit margin of something like painting, independent galleries are less willing to invest in it. The production of a catalog often depends on the resources of the hosting

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institution. And often, by the end of a project, she said, the documentation of work becomes another project in itself.41 The installation produces its own archive. All o f these factors shape the documentation of the work, the pictures that are taken, and their circulation in the art market. Hamilton considers any interpretation of her work a type of collaboration, as e videnced by her c lose working relationship with commentators on her installations, such as scholars Susan Stewart and Joan Simon. Simon, for instance, spent years not only going to all o f Hamilton’s installations but also putting together a catalogue raisonné of her work in consultation with Hamilton. The Paris-based photographer Thibault Jeanson is Hamilton’s preferred photographer o f her in stallations. Jeanson often p hotographs a rchitectural interiors f or catalogs a nd magazines. W hile w orking in E urope, Hamilton saw published in a magazine s ome photographs that Jeanson had t aken of a house in Uppsala, Sweden. The photographs inspired her to take a threehour train ride out of her way to see the house. Some time later, by chance, Jeanson’s representative submitted photographs to the Dia Ar t Foundation in a bid to photograph Hamilton’s installation tropos. When Hamilton saw the photos, which included the Uppsala photographs, she knew that he was the person to photograph her piece. He has since photographed many of her installations, including the picture is still and mantle. For tropos (1993–1994) at the Dia Art Foundation in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, Hamilton emptied the gallery and turned it into a lightand sound-filled space. She covered the floor in layers of horsehair and set an attendant a t a small t able in t he cen ter o f t he r oom. The a ttendant had a heated wire wand and burned away lines of text from a book. As the attendant worked, the recorded voice of a person with aphasia moved from speaker to speaker in the space, “turning” observers as they followed the sound. When Hamilton met wi th Jeanson at Dia, he s aid t hey s at down in t he horsehair and talked about various things for an hour or so.42 Then Hamilton left, and Jeanson recalled that he realized, “We didn’t talk about the piece. I don’t know what she wants from me. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.” Hamilton stated that it is important in interpreting her work that the writer or photographer both understands her in tentions but also makes the work his or her own.43 She wants the photographic or textual interpretation to in a certain sense become, not a contingent object, to use Martha Buskirk’s phrase, but something that stands on its own. In this way, the artist might assert, the

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photograph becomes someone else’s work and is c learly distinguished from her own. In describing his work in Hamilton’s installations, Jeanson made a distinction between making a document, which he connected to signification, and producing an illusion. He described his effort to make images of Hamilton’s work as the effort to capture a dream. The ever-changing atmosphere and the emotions evoked by Hamilton’s space for the photographer are more important than the record of concrete objects in the space. Using the metaphor of tying himself to the mast of a drifting boat, Jeanson said that as a photographer he floats around in the space and watches what happens. The photographer’s experience in Hamilton’s spaces seems very similar to the way that Hamilton describes her initial encounter with the site in which she is going to make a piece and the way she hopes a visitor will encounter her in stallations. “My site visits have a n enormous influence on t he w ork. I have to walk a si te’s impression into my body in order to begin working. I need to register silently all of the impressions your body registers (temperature, smell, light) as felt impressions before I can work. This plentitude of atmospheric information has an enormous influence with how I perceive and register the words spoken, or the sounds heard.”44 Jeanson, in photographing the space, essentially follows the same process of attentive awareness as Hamilton’s attendants. But Jeanson’s descriptions of his photographic process in Hamilton’s work make it clear that he is tr ying to capture an experience that encompasses more than mere vision. It is also clear that the photographs try to go beyond the limits of camera vision. Jeanson s aid t hat, in H amilton’s in stallations, wi thin t he co nstraints o f time and money, he would spend the first day without the camera. Then, as he got to know how the space c hanged under gi ven conditions of light, he would take out the camera and begin making exposures. He uses a la rgeformat camera with an additional viewfinder because the viewfinder on these large-format ca meras do es no t gi ve a n acc urate s ense o f t he final image’s framing. He waits for the “perfect moment,” the moment that will encapsulate the installation as a whole, and then opens the shutter, depending on the lighting conditions, for up to forty-five minutes. Given one day of work, he could take seven to eight exposures. He p hotographed the p icture is s till. Hamilton’s in stallations a t t he time used minimal light. For instance, ghost: a border act of 2000, which was men-

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tioned in t he introduction, was lo cated in a r ecently vacated factory space in Charlottesville, Virginia. The installation comprised two “rooms” made of silk screens, which were suspended from the ceiling and seemed to float in the space. A lo ng table, a sin gle chair, and a r otating digital projector were inside each room. The projector cast the image of a pencil drawing a line on the silk screens and the walls of the factory. The only light in the space was what came from the projectors. A similar situation took place in the picture is still, except, in that instance, the only light in the space came from the frosted glass windows at the front of the gallery, which rendered one side of the space very bright and the other dark. Although eyes could balance the contrasting light, t he ca mera co uldn’t. F or J eanson, t hese w ere difficult conditions in which to photograph, and so, for two of the images, he was forced to light the space so that the image would picture the space the way the eye sees it. Despite his efforts, Jeanson was unhappy with the images that he took and returned to Japan later to try again. Jeanson always uses a pa norama format when photographing Hamilton’s pieces because, he said, he thinks of them as landscapes rather than interiors. His use of this format links Hamilton’s installation art in interesting ways to the panorama paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This wideangle format, even on a p hotographic scale, encourages viewers to imagine themselves en veloped wi thin a n en vironment. P anorama p hotographs r eproduced at a small s cale do not have the same impact. However, these images approximate natural vision because they include peripheral vision. In the Jeanson photographs, the viewer gets the sense of being placed in a sp ecific position within a large illusionistic space. Panoramas, t heorists have argued, are enjoyable b ecause t hey place t he viewer in a position to command the space. Painted panoramas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were large, often circular structures painted in great detail with 360-degree views of cities or battlefields. 45 For viewers, the sensation of having the world spread out before their feet is part of the pleasure of looking at these paintings. These image-spaces reconstitute the centered subject that installation, in some accounts at least, seeks to subvert. When a photograph is read as the naturalistic depiction of three-dimensional space it, in effect, opens up the visual field and allows the viewer to command that space visually. In this situation, rather than being immersed in the space of the installation, the division between the subject (the person looking at the

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photograph) and the object (the space of the installation) is reinforced. Ther e is a small difference between many of Jeanson’s panoramic photographs of Hamilton’s installations and these images. While panorama paintings place the viewer at a high point in relation to the scene depicted, Jeanson’s photographs tend to place the viewer in t he thick of installation, the camera lens always at the height of a body standing upright. In this position, it is as if the viewer were immersed in the installation. It produces the illusion that we are eyewitnesses, so to speak, in the space. It is not so different to photograph an installation than to photograph architecture. Architectural photographers have choices in the interpretation of an architect’s work. Some make an effort to understand the architect’s intention and original vision. When documenting a work, they emphasize the essential formal qualities of a building. Often, this involves editing out incidental signs of use and context, such as vegetation, furniture, and automobiles. The image condenses the formal qualities of the architecture. Photographers may have a he avy hand in interpreting the architecture in f ormal terms for the viewer but at the same time see themselves as stepping out of the way and letting the architect’s work speak for itself. Other photographers prefer to emphasize not the concept but the building as a space that has been lived in and persisted through time, including signs of wear and tear and neglect. Often the photograph becomes a str ong and subjective interpretation of the photographer’s reaction to the aura of the space. In a sp ecial edition of Architecture California devoted to the relationship between architecture and photography, Wolf Prix points out that photographs of architecture are inherently inadequate to the experience of a building because viewers cannot sense or see what is “b ehind” them. In a p hotograph, one’s vision is na rrowed a nd f ragmented.46 And b ecause t he p hotographic print is two dimensional, the elements in that print are organized according to the logic of a flat plane or visual field. Photographs always flatten and abstract.47 In looking at a photograph, the viewer is always aware of the distinct qualities of that two-dimensional object but, if the proper visual signals a re there, susp ends the limitations of that format enough to imagine t he lived quality of what the scene depicts.48 Some photographs, of course, do this more emphatically than others. To frame the issue in s emiotic terms, the viewer could read certain signs in the photograph as naturalistic, as if the photograph represents the space of the artwork, as one would experience it first hand. At

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the other extreme, one could read the photograph as pure, flat surface. Such images tend to emphasize the formal qualities of the space and avoid imitating natural vision. Put simply, all photographers face choices about how they will manipulate the material conditions in order to make an image. Modernist photographers of the early twentieth century were delighted with the prospect of divorcing vision from its seat in the human body. As in modernist painting, some modernist photography acknowledged the flat surface of the photographic print, producing abstract images with no illusionistic space. These are images that correlate with monocular rather than binocular vision. Modernist photographers also produced images that in their depth of field exceeded the limits of natural vision in all-over clarity. The camera’s ability to capture visual phenomena that the eye couldn’t see, to fragment the visual field, and to flatten and abstract the visual world opened up aesthetic possibilities for these photographers. But it also produced a kind of disembodied, machine-like vision. Photographs that imitate natural vision carry the cues that invite the viewer to read them as dep icting three-dimensional illusionistic space. Thes e cues can include clear orthogonal lines, natural lighting, and a sense of uncalculated immediacy to the image. The analog photograph is p hysical evidence of the conditions of a certain time and place, or a “that has been,” as Roland Barthes says. For this reason, the photograph has a certain amount of authority as document, even as it marks absence. Most installation photographs are regarded in t his way. Although Hamilton uses the term “document” to describe the images of her installations, they don’t have the aesthetic of documentary photography, although most can accurately be described as naturalistic photographs.

The Catalog For The Picture Is Still The Akira Ikeda Gallery sponsored the publication of a catalog for the picture is still, which came out in 2003. 49 The book, in keeping with Jeanson’s photographs, has a pa norama format of 12 b y 15 inc hes. The photographs are arranged as a walk-through of the space, opening with an extraordinary image on the first pages that a viewer to the space probably would not see. It is a shot of the doorway in which the frosted glass doors have been opened completely.

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F I G U R E 3 . 4 A nn Hamilton, the picture is still. Akira Ikeda Gallery, Taura, Japan, May 19, 2001–May 18, 2002. M aterials: projected video image: 35 1/2 x 46 inch steel grid, thread, charcoal, video with sound, speakers. Photo credit: Thibault Jeanson. Courtesy of the Ann

Hamilton Studio.

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The exterior walls of the warehouse building are flush with the surface of the page, and within the gap produced by the opened door, the exposed cloud of charcoal branches and the torpedo tunnels recede in the gloom. The average viewer of the installation did not have this perspective on the piece, but it is an apt visual metaphor for the artist’s intentions for the installation. There is t he startling contrast between the ordinary building and its gloomy, almost eerie interior. It is a visual met aphor for excavation and discovery, the sense of a past that is present but invisible. As the image abstracts and encapsulates the meaning of the installation, it also divorces itself from the bodily experience of the space. In this sense, the photograph reveals its function as an opaque signifier, even as it appears to be a window. The startling opening of depth within the flat surface of the page is reminiscent of a Gordon Matta-Clark piece Pier In/Out (1973). It is also a suggestion of what will be a play of tension between abstraction and naturalism in photographs of the site. Not all o f the photographs in t he catalog function this way. The opening photographs work to give the catalog reader the sense of having just entered the space. On the second title page, a panoramic photograph of the branches of charcoal by Tetsuo Ito fills up both pages. The shot has been taken from the dep th o f a t orpedo c hannel lo oking u p a t t he mass o f b ranches f rom below, while a steel I-beam has been positioned to be in the page’s gutter. The branches are densely packed, filling the limits of the picture frame, going from edge to edge, and thereby flattening out the image. This is a space t hat the viewer cannot imagine entering. It is a visual space. Another functions to give viewers a striking sense of a great space opening up before them. The entire space from the head of the channel follows the steel I-beams as they recede into the space. Strong orthogonals guide the viewer’s eye into depths of the left tunnel where the video p rojection is j ust visible. The viewer is drawn irresistibly into an illusionistic, three-dimensional space. The images by Jeanson move the viewer from the position at the front of the gallery down the side of the channel, with the camera hovering just below the mass o f charcoal. The images, in pa norama format, are all in b lack and white and take up both pages. In each, the branches look as if they are a solid form in the space. The final image of this trio shatters this illusion. The camera looks across the gallery space again, but this time it has been placed among the branches of charcoal, which swarm around it.

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FIGURE

3 . 5 G ordon Matta-Clark, Pier In/Out, 1973. © 2011 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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F I G U R E 3 . 6 A nn Hamilton, the picture is still, Akira Ikeda Gallery, Taura, Japan, May 19, 2001–May 18, 2002. M aterials: projected video image: 35 1/2 x 46 inch steel grid, thread, charcoal, video with sound, speakers. Photo credit: Thibault Jeanson. Courtesy of the Ann

Hamilton Studio.

In this image, the camera is sur rounded, and only a few of the branches are in focus, almost like natural vision. It is the kind of picture that gives the viewer the sense of being immersed in the space. Jeanson, at times, decides to make a bad picture because it more accurately captures the experience of the space. In this sense, the image signifies an embodied vision, which has limits. In the p icture is s till, he allo wed s ome of t he imag es t o b e b urnt or overexposed on the sunlit side of the space, while the darker side flattened out with the branches turned into an inky, black pool. These images do mimic the appearance of the space w hen one looked to the bright door from the dark side of the room.

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F I G U R E 3 . 7 A nn Hamilton, the picture is still, Akira Ikeda Gallery, Taura, Japan, May 19, 2001–May 18, 2002. M aterials: projected video image: 35 1/2 x 46 inch steel grid, thread, charcoal, video with sound, speakers. Photo credit: Thibault Jeanson. Courtesy of the Ann

Hamilton Studio.

Jeanson’s description of his process seems quite similar to Hamilton’s ideas and descriptions of the ideal viewer’s experience in her w ork. Hamilton attempts to anchor viewers in their bodies, to make them aware of their sensations and the way the body uses those sensations to interpret a space. In the effort to capture that experience, camera vision also tries to become embodied. However, it never quite works that way. In the catalog, the photographs shift between emphasizing the depth of field, the openness of space, and the sense of being immersed, and drawing out those formal qualities of the installation that make interesting pictures, that is, the formal play of horizontal and vertical lines that work with or against the frame and flatness of the

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printed page. Where Gilbreth’s use of photographs and film sought to simplify the complexity of lived experience, Jeanson’s photographs try to recapture that complexity. These are the photographer’s, catalog designer’s, and the artist’s deliberate choices in photographic styles. There are a remarkable variety of photographic strategies designed to give the viewer an authentic sense of what it was like to be in the installation. Compared to the catalogs for the Rooms exhibition and even Matta-Clark’s Splitting, the photography and design o f the catalog for the picture is still is far more complex. Like the PS1 catalog, the photographs lead the viewer through the space, giving a sense of the passage of time. And like Matta-Clark’s, they mimic the way one turns one’s head in different directions as one moves. However, there are more ways of depicting these aspects of a space in t he Akira Ikeda catalog. The higher-quality color photographs and their size enhance the variety of photographic strategies. The difference b etween t he Rooms catalog and the picture is s till catalog marks a shift in the requirements of the art market in the 1970s and the 1980s. The conventions of catalog photography dictated the style of the photographs of her installations. As installation art has been taken up into better-funded art institutions, the style and quality of photographs have changed considerably in the last thirty-five years. One can compare the catalog of the picture is still to that produced by PS1’s Rooms in 1976. The Rooms publication with its grainy, low-production, black-and-white images look as if t hey could be reproduced in a newspaper. The images of Hamilton’s installation the picture is still, by contrast, have the quality of a photographer’s book or the high-quality layouts of architectural magazines. Because most of the installation art of the late 1960s and early 1970s was produced b y y oung a rtists w hose w ork was no t y et s ought a fter b y ma instream galleries, it was no t as sub ject to commercial pressures. Along with their interest in de-aest heticizing art practice, many artists in t his position had little reason to spend the money to document an installation extensively. And, for s ome artists, ephemeral work need no t b e preserved to t he s ame extent because the experience itself was the focus. As Allan Kaprow argued, what could a photograph capture about such an experience?50 For the small group of insiders who saw the work in i ts original state, the photograph or the video serves merely to jog personal memory. But for those who come after, the photograph becomes an iconic sign of an exclusive event.51 It becomes a

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contingent object that signifies a moment in time within the institution of art history. This realization on the part of art institutions and galleries has placed pressure to produce exhibition catalogs that sustain interest and represent an artist’s work accurately.

And Yet, Photographs Are Never Enough It is interesting that Hamilton’s inspiration for the picture is still, and her exploration of the issue of agency, came from looking at a photograph and concluding it is impossible to understand history from an image. It is something that she deals with in her installations all of the time. Because she never repeats an installation, the majority of her audience encounters images of her work before it ever sees one of her installations in the flesh. Each of her pieces is usually specific to and inspired by the site in which they have been made. Only parts of her work, such as mechanical objects or individual tables, have traveled to different venues. The photographs of Hamilton’s installations are documentation, according to the artist.52 And almost every one of her installations has been beautifully photographed. Installation art, for the most part, seeks to produce an immersive, embodied experience and, not only an immersive experience, but also a situation in which the boundary between subject and object is nearly breached. For her part, Hamilton points out that much of her w ork has b een about exploring boundaries and investigating the possibility of their rupture. In order to appreciate this aspect of her work, it is necessary to be enveloped by it. Photographs can’t achieve this effect of being enveloped in a space , nor can they imitate the sound of charcoal chiming in the wind. This is the inherent defect of two-dimensional images as documentation of three-dimensional spaces in real time. Robert Morris notes that, in viewing a photograph, one is always removed from the moment in which it was taken while, at the same time, one’s body is outside the place that it depicts. One must always project oneself into the photograph and connect the twodimensional object to the three-dimensional space i t depicts. Photography, as Amelia Jones notes, is never enough. For Morris, “spatial arts,” in which I would include installation art, should elude the stifling grasp o f the photograph. “It is of course space- and time-denying photography that has been so malevolently effective in shifting an entire cultural perception away from the

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reality of time in a rt that is lo cated in space .”53 Morris sees photography as homogenizing experience, transforming it into easily consumed units. In the new “spatial arts,” by contrast, the viewer is surrounded by the work. The experience, which engages the “I” mode, is imageless. It cannot be pictured or represented, or can be so only in a way that deceives. For Morris, the “I” aspect of the viewer in one of his pieces is the self as it is poised at the tip of “time’s arrow.” This is the self in the moment of direct experience without memory, language, or reflection. Any reflection, judgment, or associations that emerge after that initial moment shift consciousness into the “me” aspect.54 Morris, in this essay, favors the “I” mode of experience, and his simple objects of the early to mid-1960s with their uninflected dull sur faces a nd sim ple sha pes a re in tended t o dis courage vie wers f rom thinking about metaphoric relationships or allusions and to engage them instead in a r eflection on t heir immediate p erceptions. Morris des cribes t he shift into the “me” mode of engagement, into transformative representations, such as language and images, as the entrance of “noise” into the system. Immediate, li ved exp erience w ould s eem t o b e exp erience b efore i t is s ocial, before it circulates among different people. The “me” mode is the beginning of the representational process that transfers this direct experience into memory, language, and pictures. It is the stage at which direct experience is grasped by social structures and, E. P. Thompson might argue, becomes ideological. This is o ne of t he reasons photography was tr oubling to Allan Kaprow. Kaprow t hought t he p hotograph co uld no t ca pture t he ac tual exp erience of an event, and he also believed they could only be rather weak substitutes. And like many artists working with ephemeral objects and experiential art forms in the 1960s and 1970s, he under stood the photograph as extraneous and superfluous to his “real” work. Photographs appear as integral parts of a few of Kaprow’s Happenings and gestures but often in a wa y that points out the inadequacy of the photograph. He noticed that it was impossible for people in his events and activities to refrain from posing for the photographs, which disrupted the spontaneity of the Happening.55 Kaprow spoofs the photographic document in his piece Transfer (1968). In Transfer, Kaprow directed participants to stack oil and chemical barrels in various configurations at sites around Middletown, Connecticut, and spray paint them a different color at each site. After each construction and painting, Kaprow had participants pose in an obvious way for a “triumphal photo-

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graph.” A ccording t o J eff K elley, K aprow was p ointing o ut t he a rt w orld’s need for photographs and images of these events that were meant to be experienced. These images, which are set-up, hokey reactions to the Happening, play up the distance between experience and image that Kaprow wanted to avoid in his w ork. Ro land B arthes des cribes t he p rocess o f b eing p hotographed as one in which the subject is mortified and rendered an object, even a museum object.56 Kaprow’s later projects were often deliberately unphotographable or, at least, unsatisfying as images, involving slow and invisible processes, such as wetting and drying stones, breathing into a partner’s mouth, or exchanging buckets of dirt. Kaprow also used the photograph to point out the absence that is an inherent part of t he photograph. In Six Ordinary Happenings, Kaprow u sed t he photograph as evidence of a tiny event that had already taken place. For Giveaway, a part of Six Ordinary Happenings, stacks of dishes were arranged in impromptu still-life groups on street corners and then photographed. The next day, the empty street corners were then photographed. In this project, absence (of dishes) was em bedded in t he structure of the photograph. But this particular Happening also pointed out the absence of lived experience in the photograph itself or the transformation of experience into something else. The photograph becomes a poor substitute for the original activity. Rather than avoiding having her work documented by photographs, however, Ann Hamilton has chosen to explore the representation of bodily experience in photographs in a new project.

Embodied Images: Hamilton’s Photographs The photograph’s desire is not to signify at all costs; nor to witness or inform. It is more of a shock or illusion. Or a disappearance as well, because if something wants to be come an image, it is not to endure but to better disappear. (my translation)57 — Jean Baudrillard, from Sommes-Nous? 58

In the Jean Baudrillard quotation above, from a chapter in a r ecent book of contemporary p hotography, he a rgues t hat p hotography is no t a bout wi tnessing. He proposes that things want to be photographed not so they endure but rather so they can better disappear. In photography, the body disappears behind the image. It becomes a sp ecter. As demonstrated in t he catalog by

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Akira Ikeda, photographs of Hamilton’s installations tend to be naturalistic images that imitate illusionistic space or formal abstractions. Each style represents a f orm o f dis embodied visio n, in t he mo de o f flat, visual space o r monocular vision. C an t he more ineffable asp ects of b odily exp erience b e captured in a photograph? Hamilton explores this in a series of portrait photographs titled face to face, which she began in the late 1990s. The project consists of a series of pinhole photographs of close associates. Hamilton has made a series of these images using f riends, fa mily, a nd p eople wi th w hom she has w orked o n p rojects. This group of pictures combines images and experience in a way that illuminates the complicated relationship between representation and experience in Hamilton’s work. These images explore the limits to representing bodily experience in photographs. They do s o by embedding the chemical and even the mechanical process of photography in the body and rendering the experience shared by the sitter and photographer. For the sitter, the process involves the uncanny sensation of being stilled and observed by another. In a certain sense, these photographs are like her installations in that one gains a unique perspective on them by experiencing them first hand. In this case, first hand means being photographed by the artist. Hamilton p hotographed me in a gr ungy pa rking lo t in Cha rlottesville, Virginia, in 2000, w hen she came to the University of Virginia to make the installation ghost: a border act. The experience was acutely uncomfortable as it involved staring at the artist’s mouth at close range for thirty seconds or more. For this series of images, Hamilton made a set of simple pinhole cameras by p oking a ho le in a p lastic film canister in w hich she had lo dged a single frame of unexposed film. She then put the film canister in her mouth and had me st and dir ectly in f ront o f her o nly inc hes f rom her face a nd opened her lips in order to expose the film. Because I am slightly taller than Hamilton, I had to hold still and peer down into her mouth for what felt like an extrao rdinarily lo ng time . Once t he exp osure was co mplete, H amilton closed her mo uth/the shutter, t hen removed t he canister f rom her mo uth, and covered the small pinhole with a piece of tape until the film was ready to be developed. In some ways, the experience of being photographed in t his manner was probably similar to what it was like for those first daguerreotype sitters who

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had to be restrained by devices long enough for their images to be captured by t he s ensitized p hotographic p late. However, t he exp erience in t his cas e was made more uncomfortable since I was p laced in close proximity to another human being. I was not looking at her eyes but, in fact, staring at part of her face that one usually doesn’t look at for very long. In this sense, I was both in t he presence of another being and looking at her in a n objectifying way. I was also aware that she had an equally good view of my face. In fact, she had time to study my face and to realize, I felt, that I was trying to act relaxed and hide my posture but failing miserably. Needless to say, it was amusing but uncomfortable. When Hamilton showed me t he result of the exposure, she s aid she was pleased with it b ecause my uncer tainty and vulnerability was p lain to s ee on my face. In the image, it seems as if I a m peering with trepidation into a watery, eye-shaped hole. Hamilton explains that the human figure, the sitter, in the image takes the place of the pupil in t he eye. Hamilton writes, “ The resulting image is a trace p resence of the time of standing or sitting ‘face to face’ with a person or landscape. The figure or landscape becomes the pupil in the eye shape created by my mouth, much the same way as one sees a tiny image of oneself in t he reflection of another person’s pupil.”59 The image is blurry and ringed by the smudged outline of Hamilton’s lips, which happen to look like the edge of eyelids. In each print, the image is distorted as the light rays were bent by the pinhole. Some images are clouded. Others are sharp, depending o n ho w much t he si tter mo ved as t he film was exp osed. S ome people smile. Others stare. In other images, you can tell that the two participants couldn’t keep from laughing. Each is t he record of the encounter between two bodies and, more than just bodies, two faces. The length of time for each exposure and the tension that builds up during that time s eem to be infused into the image. At the same time, the images illustrate one of Hamilton’s principle interests — the transposition of the senses. In this case, eyes become mouths and mouths become eyes. In essence, she is trying to make the notion of embodied vision literal by embedding vision in a part of the body that touches and tastes but does not see. Hamilton’s photographs slow down vision by anchoring it in the body, creating the illusion that one can see someone seeing. We are both “inside” the seeing subject and outside at the same time. These images thicken the flat surface of the photograph in the process, so that the image conveys in

F I G U R E 3 . 8 A nn Hamilton, face to face, 41, 51, 58, 2001. M edium: pigment print in wood frame. Edition: 3 with 2 Artist’s Proofs (each). Photo credit: Courtesy of the Ann Hamilton Studio.

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some sense the experience of seeing and being seen. In this way, Hamilton’s pinhole photographs work against the disembodied, instantaneous quality of vision found in most photographs. In her recent book Self/Image, Amelia Jones describes photographic practice as emerging from the desire “to see and know from a single point of view.” She t hen goes on to connect t his to t he mo dern ideology of t he singular, centered, male artist as genius.60 The photograph as document is connected to the production of this subject in Western culture, as it satisfies the demand to s ee and know. In t his relationship, t he object of photographic vision is rendered legible according to the knowledge disciplines of Western culture, while the viewing subject is invisible and illegible and, therefore, escapes the grasp of these disciplines. However, Jones argues that Western philosophy is incorrect when it identifies a dic hotomy between perceiving subject and perceived object insofar as it ignores the ways that subjects are produced through images. The Western subject, she a rgues, is p roduced in t he structures of representation that developed d uring a nd a fter t he Rena issance, inc luding p hotography. S he points to Jane C opjec’s argument regarding Renaissance painting in w hich she argues that classical Renaissance painting, which depicts a clarified threedimensional, illusionistic space based on one-point perspective describes not the visual world per se but rather the drive to see. For this reason, not only is vision in this space not disembodied, but also the image includes and constitutes the body, and vice v ersa. The viewer/subject emerges from within the image. The boundaries of subject and object, in images, are woven together in complicated ways. Jones extends this argument to new imaging technologies, such as video. Working from the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s theory of the screen, Jones describes t he video s creen as em bodied or as fleshed. In p erformance ar t documented by video, t he s creen b ecomes a p oint o f p hysical co ntact b etween the viewer’s body and the artist’s. In the work of someone like the Swiss video a rtist P ipilotti Rist, t he str ict di vision b etween sub ject a nd ob ject is broken down as one watches the video. The viewer and the artist’s body are both immersed and subsumed by the screen.61 Video, Jones argues, becomes a form of haptic visuality or the mixture of sight and touch.62 In Roland Barthes’s late work Camera Lucida, he exa mines photography from the point of view of the desiring viewer rather than the critic: “Every

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time I would read something about Photography, I would think of some photograph that I loved, and this made me furious. Myself, I saw only the referent, the desired object, the beloved body.”63 Barthes describes the photography as fleshy, something that captures experience and evokes affect. Camera Lucida is a phenomenological study of the photograph as an object that engages the body — from the mechanical clicking sound of the camera shutter release to the sensation of being pierced by the photograph. The punctum is the detail that ruptures the ordinary reading of a photograph drawn from the cultural codes available to the viewer, which Barthes describes as the studium. It is the punctum that penetrates the viewer’s body, while the studium remains respectfully at a dist ance: “ What I ca n na me ca nnot r eally p ierce me . The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.”64 Barthes sug gests t hat t here is a n ineffable asp ect of exp erience t hat t he image can capture. He links p hotographs, in t his way, not only to desiring bodies but also to death. In a famous passage, Barthes describes the way that photographs mortify the body by demanding the sitter pose for the camera. In t he process, he obs erves, “the Photograph (t he one I in tend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a sub ject w ho f eels he is b ecoming a n object: I t hen exp erience a micro-version of death (parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.”65 In the process of becoming image, one shifts from subject to object. Hamilton’s photographs involve the experience of the gaze of another from the position of the person looking and the person being looked at. In the case of H amilton’s p inhole p hotographs, t he p hotographer a nd t he si tter sha re these positions. The tension between subject and object is heightened in this work. The photographs record the oscillation between subject and object in the act of capturing the image. Hamilton sees her work shift and turn on the point that Barthes describes where bodily experience shifts to image, subject turns to object, and experience becomes sign. I t is t he same point beyond which Robert Morris did not want the spatial arts to go. Hamilton’s work in this way is distinguished from Morris’s spatial arts. Hamilton’s work explores the limits of these positions, trying to uncover what is held in common when these boundaries are breached. This is perhaps why Hamilton cites Helène Cixous’s 1991 book “Coming to Writing” as one of the works that has been most influential for her. Cixous’s essay is a poetic recounting of her experience as a woman who has an almost

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physical urge to write. The urge is expressed precisely in the multiplicity and fragmentation of language. In her w ork, the body and the senses are taken apart and transformed into text: Maybe I have written to see; to have what I never would have had; so that having would be the privilege not of the hand that takes and encloses, of the gullet, of the gut; but of the hand that points out, of fingers that see, that design, from the tips of the fingers that transcribe by the sweet dictates of vision. . . . Writing to touch with letters, with lips, with breath, to caress with the tongue, to lick with the soul, to taste the blood of the beloved body, of life in its remoteness; to saturate distance with desire.66

Writing for Cixous is a n acknowledgment of distance and desire, but it is  at t he s ame time t he process in w hich subject b ecomes material object and the object produces the subject. In the marks on the page, a new body is created, which encompasses and surpasses her identity as a J ewish woman. Hamilton’s pinhole photographs in disp lacing the senses seek to intertwine viewing subject and viewed object in a manner similar to what Amelia Jones suggests in her a nalysis of self and image. Hamilton’s pinhole photographs make sensible, rather than just visible, the process of seeing and the desire to see. As Mary Ann Doane noted, “But it is finally in the new representational technologies of vision — photography, the cinema — that one witnesses the insistency o f t he im possible desir e t o r epresent — to a rchive — the p resent.”67 In the moment one tries to grasp the present, the moment of seeing, the archival impulse emerges. Hamilton’s images reinforce the fact that vision is always embodied and limited. But they also reveal how much bodily experience is intertwined with and framed by images.

Experience and Image This chapter has lo oked at installations that appeal to an experience that is available through the body and that requires the viewer’s direct experience of the piece. Installation art that requires the viewer’s direct participation and bodily presence partakes in a notion of John Dewey’s description of experience. According to Dewey, in the dynamic interaction between observer and environment, each shapes the other. And in the process, each is transformed, having gained something new. The development of installation into a famil-

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iar global genre in a rt is link ed to the interest and desire for extraordinary experiences. Ann Hamilton’s explanation for the appeal of her work might be that her installations ground the viewer’s consciousness in her body in a way that our culture and contemporary environment no lo nger requires but for which we long. Installations such as these that focus on bodily experience, including Ann Hamilton’s, Ric hard S erra’s a nd o thers, s eem t o def y r ecording b y p hotograph. Something is missing in t he images of these works and, in t hat lack, the viewer longs for the full experience. Hamilton’s work is in teresting because it explores t he tension b etween image and exp erience. And in s ome ways it is because these works cannot be captured adequately in photography that t hey a re fas cinating a nd all uring. L ike B enjamin’s ide as o f t he r itual objects and the power of aura, these works require pilgrimages to really see them. Thus, even as the experience of these works escapes capture by images, it never completely excludes or ignores the photograph but is in fact framed by it. Each of these works produces an archive that represents the desire to grasp lived experience. The in stallations t hat appeal t o dir ect b odily exp erience ul timately p roduce their own archives, in the form of photographs and catalogs.68 The catalogs and images of these works bring them into the realm of art history. The photographs will ul timately be the memory of these installations, will p rovide the jumping-off point for future histories of this genre, and as we saw in chapter 1, t hey will shape our understanding of these installations in the future. In the next c hapter, we will lo ok at installations in w hich the nowoutmoded media o f analog film and photography have become part of the subject matter of installation art.

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camera obscura M E M O R Y I N F I L M A N D V I D E O I N S TA L L AT I O N S I N T H E

2000S

For me, making a film is connected to the idea of loss and disappearance. —Tacita Dean

The installations in t his chapter address the sensuous aspects of outmoded analog media and raise questions about how these forms of technology have shaped experience and now shape memory. These installations are archival in the sense that they interrogate the representation of history and memory, but t hey als o draw o n t he materiality a nd s ensuous asp ects o f t hese nowoutmoded f orms o f r ecording. In Renée G reen’s w ork, t he slide sho w a nd other outmoded forms of media, such as vinyl l ps and Super 8 footage, have been used as part of the material of her installations and films because they mark cer tain time p eriods. According t o Andr eas Huyssen, “ The issue o f media is central to the way we live structures of temporality in our culture.”1 These forms of media fascinate at the moment of their obsolescence because they mark a shift in t he way we remember and in t he archival objects we produce. It may be useful to consider these materials using Sherry Turkle’s notion of “evocative objects.” She defines evocative objects as those things that because they are s o integral to daily ac tivities have b ecome part of our emotional and thinking lives. “We think with the objects we love. We love the objects we t hink with,” she ass erts.2 The fas cination with outmoded media in t he form of film and recordings of various kinds r epresented in t hese installations is due to the fact that these media, which produce anxiety and excitement when first introduced, have now become familiar and beloved objects. Their appearance as art objects also suggests an interest in how time is measured and memory is exp erienced at the end o f the twentieth century and

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into the twenty-first — this moment when analog photography is giving way to digital. Tacita Dean’s film Kodak presents the artist’s feeling of melancholy at the passage of analog film. Nostalgia may be the word to describe this curiosity with the outmoded, but nostalgia has been a disdained response to change in modernity. However, these works suggest that the nostalgia evoked provides a way to think about the transformations of technology and memory and the social effects of these media at the end o f the twentieth century. The works discussed in this chapter engage the viewer’s body in the materiality of these now-obsolete media, in viting us t o r eflect o n memo ry a nd ep hemerality through our affective reaction to these materials. Analog film and photography now spark bodily memory. I will be discussing the work of Tacita Dean, Matthew Buckingham, and Tony Cokes. In the film installations of Matthew Buckingham and Tacita Dean, the emphasis remains on the sensuous experience of film as a no w-outmoded medium. In the video installation of Tony Cokes, however, the flattening effect of digital photographic media is used to create a distanced perspective from which the viewer can reflect on the social effects of technology.

Endings: Tacita Dean’s Kodak Tacita Dean’s film Kodak, produced in 2006, is a medi tation on the passing of 16 mm film as a widely available medium. Dean takes as her subject matter the production of Kodak film at one of the few remaining plants in France, which was s cheduled to cease production shortly after she made her p iece. Running at forty-four minutes, Kodak consists of shots of three to four minutes in w hich the camera is fixed and focused on a piece of equipment or a corridor in the plant. The only sound is the ambient sound of the plant — the hiss of the air ducts, the slosh of chemicals in vats, and the whir of the rollers that guide the plastic film as it moves through the machines. Dean’s film begins by showing us t he factory as if i t were an empty stage set. She composes the shots in a manner that recalls photographs by Charles Sheeler or Walker Evans3 or perhaps Bernd and Hilla Becher, the pair of salvagers who sought to preserve the industrial architecture of Western Europe in their photographs. We see a large drum and a sloping piece of metal. A line of fluorescent lights cuts across the top of the frame. The image is static and

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conveys the sense that these monolithic machines were intended to be there for centuries. However, we know that they will soon be idle ruins. And “ruin” is one of the key terms used to describe Dean’s fascination with her subject matter.4 Kodak folds in on itself, as the artist uses some of the last film produced by the French Kodak plant to make it. The work in this way is a film that elegizes its own dis appearance. The piece als o has a c lassical str ucture, as i t t akes place over the course of a single day of production at the plant. This is t he same str ucture found in p ieces t hat record t heir own production, such as process art where the time and procedure of the work’s making is inscribed into the body of the work. Dean’s film has a sense of melancholy that reflects her reluctance to let this medium of art making go. She was born in Canterbury, England, in 1965 and attended Falmouth School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. She came to filmmaking early, having been given a Standard 8 camera when she was a child.5 Filmmaking was part of the family history, as Dean’s grandfather Basil Dean began the Ealing Film Studios. Perhaps because of this childhood history, her 16 mm films focus on history and the passage of time, such as the film of the setting sun (The Green Ray, 2001) or the contradictions of history, as in the strange relics of a futuristic boat of the 1960s (Teignmouth Electron, 2000). And, like Green, Dean too has addressed Robert Smithson’s work in her pieces. In surprising ways, the subject matter of Dean’s work parallels that of Renée Green’s. As Hal Foster noted, both artists’ works can be considered a form of archival practice. Serial structures appear in each artist’s work. In fact, Dean’s artists book Floh (2001) is dependent on a serial structure and the ability of the viewer to produce meaning from a set of photographs. If Green’s work employs the serial structure of the slide show as a memory ritual, Dean’s employs the photo album, another quintessential format for displaying private photographs. But where the photographs in Green’s work have a personal history to which we as viewers are privy, Dean’s photographs are homeless and silent. The pictures in this book were collected from flea markets and junk shops while Dean was tra veling. We see in t hem the same patterns that one sees in all family snapshots: images of prized possessions, vacations, and notable moments — the kind o f t hings t hat w e as co nsumers have b een t aught t o photograph, as I noted in chapter 2. But we also have a sense of what catches

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Dean’s eye, which includes strange images, such as a butterfly resting on a snow bank or photographs of the singing group The Osmond Family taken from a television screen.6 As in Green’s work, the sequence seems to be important — but we struggle to draw the connections from one image to the next. Sometimes t hey s eem formal, s ometimes t hematic, and at other times t he only connection seems to be stark contrast. Dean’s work invites us to draw connections between the sequences of images. But these are unheimlich images — so familiar but also inexplicable. They form a kind of uncanny archive that records an image of the human world, as Jean-Christophe Royoux says.7 Both Renée Green and Tacita Dean are interested in how history and memory are made a nd the effects of each. B oth spin narratives that bring their artistic p ersonae into play as p rotagonists. E ach of t hem has made a w ork about Robert Smithson’s work in which the notion of pilgrimage and ruin is involved. Dean chose Spiral Jetty and made a s ound piece that recorded her search for the piece (Searching for Spiral Jetty, 1997).8 However, although she is an archival artist, she rarely produces installations that mimic archives the way Green has done. Instead, the installation format enters her work mostly via film and film projection, and as wi th all o f the pieces discussed in t his chapter, sound is an important aspect of her work. Endings are a perennial theme in Dean’s work.9 She focuses on the end of futuristic dreams in the 1960s and demonstrates how strange it is to see the failed or obsolete future in ruins — something like Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “wish image.” Walter Benjamin’s concept of the wish image represents the unfulfilled collective hopes for the future latent in a ma nufactured object. The wish image arises in response to dissatisfying social conditions and is created by reaching back “to a mo re distant past in o rder to break from conventional forms.” It is w hen the wish imag es’ future-oriented nature is not realized — when, as S usan Buck-Morss s ays, it remains unconscious, a dream — that the wish image turns into a fetish. In the fetish, the wish is perceived by the collective to have been actualized, and the impetus for change is nullified.10 It is the strangeness of the historical artifact, its evocative quality, that intrigues us and allows the viewer a moment to reflect on historical changes — and endings. Hal Foster writes of Dean, and the others he names archival artists, “Archival artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present.”11 This physicality is the important aspect of these pieces, as they call on bodily memory.

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Although D ean’s w orks t hemselves a re f ragments, t hey ha ve a unified structure and focus on a single event, which has a beginning and ending. In studying single objects, a sin gle phenomenon, site, or person, Dean’s films and other pieces have a w holeness t hat Green’s do es not pretend to have. There is too in Dean’s work an unapologetic melancholy that Green’s tends to eschew. The film Kodak exemplifies the qualities of unity, silence, and melancholy in Dean’s work. At certain points in Kodak, the factory seems to be a window on the past. The plant itself is da ted, and we can see in t he bones of its old machines and outmoded control boards that what had been considered the latest in tw entieth-century technology is now archaic. The factory fills with technicians who move carts around and arrange plastic sheets o n spindles to transport to other parts of the factory. At one point, the camera focuses on a ma n w earing a w hite j umpsuit. Glo ves a re sho ved ca relessly in his bac k pocket while he is performing some kind of operation at a console among a field of illuminated buttons. The scenes in the factory, such as this one, have the atmosphere of t he 1960s — that moment in time in w hich t he utopian future seemed just at hand, when modernity seemed to have triumphed. In this realization, there is a sur prising recognition that this time o f hope has passed. This surprise includes the way labor is depicted in the film. The skilled factory labor that goes into making the film product, the carefully regulated breaks taken by workers, and the rhythm of production at the factory, which moves at an unfamiliar pace, seem alien to the twenty-first-century, middleclass art viewer. However, it is the materiality of the raw plastic that seems to intrigue the artist most. At certain points, the movie shifts to color. The factory is darkened. Light shines through the back of layers of plastic as they move over the spindles. The edges form shimmering lines like pink water rippling in the air. In the darkness it is t he sounds that take over: the rhythmic squeaks of the equipment and the air rushing through the vents. The camera dimly observes people moving in the dark and focuses on workers. An employee takes a reel of film base off the equipment and replaces it with an empty spindle. As the plastic moves across rollers and from one machine to the next, it looks like water cascading down a surface or a field of glowing color fixed in the air. In its early stages, the plastic is t hick like taffy and at points takes on a b right cerulean hue that looks like pure color.

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F I G U R E 4 . 1 Tacita Dean, Kodak, 2006. Film installation; 16 mm color and black-andwhite film. Courtesy of the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

Then, suddenl y, d ull, b rown paper r eplaces t he film. The space c hanges from transparent and glowing to dull, strict, sculptural lines. It turns out that Dean has chosen one of the days in t he year in w hich the factory lights are turned on and paper is run through the equipment. The paper shoots down across the spindles, revealing how fast t he plastic was ac tually moving. In a long shot, it descends down into the depths of the factory like a snake flying through the machine, going into the depth of the factory space. In another sequence, shot in black-and-white film, the viewer sees the paper edge on. It transforms back into a transparent substance that once again resembles water streaking do wn t he sur face o f t he s creen. The p ink r eemerges, r eturning color to the dim space, as the paper slips away. Then the workers seem to be withdrawing from the factory space. This is the end of the workday. In the corridor, people are passing and chatting. Some have coats on. Some give kisses on both cheeks to their fellow employees. As the corridor fills up, we can hear people whistling and punching their time cards. They are going home.

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F I G U R E 4 . 2 Tacita Dean, Kodak, 2006. Film installation; 16 mm color and black-andwhite film. Courtesy of the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. 

Soon the factory is empty. The machines are still. The camera focuses on a deserted loading area with arrows painted on the pavement. Abandoned office chairs range across a vaca nt hangar with faded n umbers on the wall. Broken signs hang on chains from the ceiling. Unwound from spindles, film bits litter the floor. We see a dirty production area, an empty, illuminated corridor. The arrows painted on the walls le ad us out of the factory and to the end of the piece: a room littered with odds and ends of film and debris. Film itself has become waste material, as the screen goes dark. In first decade of the twenty-first century, the Kodak Company has begun to cease or scale back the manufacture of various products related to analog film and photography, as digital media have begun to take over. During the 1990s and 2000s, various corporations released new versions of digital scanners, digital cameras, and digital projectors with increasingly high resolution and color quality. In response, in 2004, Kodak ceased the manufacture of film slide p rojectors, a nd in 2005, t he co mpany ce ased makin g K odachrome Super 8 film. M eanwhile, K odak has als o b egun makin g digi tal p roducts and acquiring companies that do so. In 2009, the company stopped making Kodachrome 64 film, which is the last of the Kodachrome products. Devel-

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opment services for this film were only available through December 2010. Although 16 mm film i s s till a vailable, i t will be o nly per haps a s pecialty product, relegated to the realm of fine art.12 Dean’s film is a point of reference for this chapter because it demonstrates how our relationships to the technologies that were seen to transform experience and memory at the beginning of the twentieth century have now changed. The viewers’ responses to these outmoded media references a once-familiar, scripted social experience that has become defunct. The works discussed in this chapter, which include Tony Cokes’s Headphones (2004), a nd Matthew Buckingham’s Situation Leading to a Story (1999), present different possibilities for involving viewers in the physical encounter with analog media that are now part of the experiential aspect of installation art, to reflect on the shaping of memory in the twentieth century. When the film Kodak was exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in 2007, it was disp layed in a ho me-like atmosphere in a r oom with carpeted floors and soft armchairs. As James Quandt notes, Dean deliberately places the projector in such a way that one can hear the sound of film as it whirs through the machine, “a sound oddly antique.”13 Dean, he notes, refuses to show her films in a traditional cinema format. Instead, she prefers installations where viewers can move around. At the Guggenheim Museum, the projector was placed in a room separate from the projection, but one could still hear the fan and the sound of the projector as it moved. The arrangement highlighted the flickering quality of 16 mm p rojected film in a n atmosphere that was da rk and inviting, familiar to those of a cer tain generation, but also somber because the work represented the passing of this recent period in hist ory, the era of analog. Even the practice of watching an analog film will soon be relegated to the arena of fine art.

Moving Images as Installation Art In the closed space of cinema there is no movement, no circulation, and no exchange. In the dark, visitors sink into their seats as though sinking into bed. The cinema becomes a cocoon, inside of which a crowd of relaxed, idle bodies is fixed, hypnotized by simulations of reality fixed on a single screen. This model is broken apart by the folding of the dark space of cinema into the white cube of the gallery. — Chrissie Iles, Into the Light

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The film or video installation of the 1960s and 1970s drew on the interests of Minimalism to bring the work of art into the viewer’s space and to engage the viewer’s body. In the process, the viewers become mobile bodies invited to reflect on their perceptions of the space, to take different viewpoints, and to take note of the architectural situation as well as the physical qualities of the image. In other words, ideally, the projected image installation allows for the kind of reflection on perception in real time that Robert Morris advocates in “The Present Tense of Space.” Kate Mondloch has wr itten about this aspect of installation art. When one considers the body in these media installations, the screen emerges quite clearly as a material object in the installation space that sets off another array of experiential factors that must be acknowledged. She describes screens as a mbivalent objects — both material objects in t he viewer’s space a nd vir tual windows t hrough w hich t he vie wer lo oks. This focus on screens allows her to describe various modes of viewing structured by the inclusion of these objects in art contexts. These installations are designated “screen-reliant” because the screen is something with which the viewer must interact.14 The presence of the moving image and screen surface also makes the experience o f time mo re co mplicated in film a nd video in stallations. Margaret Morse has argued that video installation is both an art of presentation (installation) and an art of representation (photography, video, and film). Unlike the tradi tional film, in a n in stallation t hat inc ludes mo ving imag e media, there is no c lear separation between the viewer and the material on display. In the works discussed in this chapter, the film projector is often also a significant object in the installation. In the installation format, the viewer is able to move through the space and to examine the image in a way not permitted in these other formats. Several rhythms of time a re experienced at once in film installations, including the pace of bodily experience, the movement of film through the projector, and the time of the film story. The installations that are discussed in this chapter are all interior spaces — rooms. The L atin w ord f or r oom is camera. The o riginal ca mera obs cura, developed in the Middle Ages, would have been a room in which a hole was made in a wall in o rder to let light from outside be cast inside. A screen or sheet could be hung to intercept the light, and on that sheet, a p erfect but reversed and upside-down image would be projected.15 The technology was soon used both as a kind of entertainment as well as a scientific instrument,

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to view solar eclipses safely. Of course, camera obscuras are the basis for the modern camera. This is a minor connection between the origins of photography and the development of room-sized, film-installation exhibition spaces, but it is interesting to ponder. The contrast with the cinema space in these old camera obscuras is significant. Where traditional movie theaters have viewers s eated, t hese camera obs curas would have allowed t he vie wer to move around. And interestingly, these camera obscura spaces and installation art spaces represent more closely the setting of early cinema exhibitions where the film projector itself was an object of fascination for the viewer.16 Before 1907, vie wers b ehaved mo re lik e t hey w ere in a space o f leisur e, walkin g in and out, talking loudly because the films were mostly silent and the length of the projection was very short. The image is made material and physically present in these modern installation works. One of the works that represented a breakthrough in the phenomenological or sculptural presentation of the projected image was Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone.17 In this very simple 1973 film, McCall made the beam of projected light from the projector the focus of the viewer’s attention because it occupied a volume in space. Made by filming and playing back in slowed-down time a cir cle b eing drawn on a sur face, t he cone emerges from a line of light over the course of half an hour. As this process unfolded, viewers could walk t hrough the space, walk t hrough the cone, and observe the projector as it cast the light. Time, the viewer’s body, and perception are brought to bear in this work. “[The gallery] is rather the ground over which the temporalized space of the installation breaks.”18 In this situation, the image takes on a materiality and a presence in time and space that does not happen in cinema.

Make Your Camera the Family Historian! Matthew Buckingham’s Situation Leading to a Story Matthew Buckingham was born in 1963 in Iowa and graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago. He received an mf a from Bard College and also went on to attend the Whitney Independent Study Program. He has f ocused on film and photography throughout his career, and he shares the same fascination with memory and history as the other artists discussed in this chapter. For instance, in Image of Absalon to Be Projected until It Vanishes (2001),

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Buckingham us ed a p hotograph o f a n eq uestrian mo nument t o a b ishop named Absalon (Absalon participated in the Crusades and used his plunder to co mmission a hist ory o f D enmark). The title of t he w ork des cribes t he piece accurately. The slide is t o be projected until the film fades co mpletely due to exposure from the heat of the slide projector.19 Although the project comments on the ethics of commemorating historical figures such as Absalon as heroes, it also speaks to the fragility of photographic media. The work is again a type of process art into which decay becomes part of the structure of the work. In 1999, Buckingham produced the film installation Situation Leading to a Story, in which he walks viewers through the process of gleaning a history from material fragments. In this case, the fragments consist of four 16 mm home movies that the narrator discovered discarded on a street in New York. Each has a different subject matter: a garden party in the 1920s, the renovation of a car garage in the 1930s, a bullfight, and a film that documents the building of a tramway in the Andes. The story comes out of the author’s attempt to connect the films to each other and to their origin. In the course of narrating the films, Buckingham outlines the possible circumstances in which they were made by telling the story of the marketing and sale of Kodak home movie cameras. The story begins at the end of the films’ lives. One e vening, Buckingham was walking on Eighth Street in New York City after watching a film at the Independent Film Center. He noticed a small box labeled Best and Company, a now-defunct department store, lying on a sidewalk next to some trash. The box contained four reels of 16 mm film nestled in labeled canisters. When the artist opened the film cans, he noticed that the films were brittle and had a strange odor, which is indicative of “vinegar syndrome.” Acetate film breaks down over time, releasing acetic acids, which cause the plastic and emulsion to erode. The reaction produces a vinegar smell. Because of the films’ condition, Buckingham decided to transfer the images to a new film. The new film stocks were then spliced together. The sequence begins with a film labeled Garden. It shows a white, middle-class family dressed in the style of the 1920s a t home on a summer da y in a co untry house. The men w ear jackets and hats and shoot arrows at targets or play golf. The women swing on garden swings or walk through the garden smoking cigarettes. A little girl watches her older relatives shoot arrows. In one sequence, the camera operator films birds leaving a nest in the eaves of the house. The sec-

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F I G U R E 4 . 3 M atthew Buckingham, Situation Leading to a Story, 1999, Film still. Film installation. © Matthew Buckingham. Courtesy of the Murray Guy Gallery.

ond film shows the building of a ca ble car network in t he Peruvian Andes. There a re st unning shots of t he mountains as c louds roll by t hem. White people make surveys while Peruvian locals pull on long cables or train horses and mules. Horses are shown carrying the materials of the tramway up the mountain. The t hird film shows t he ex cavation o f t he ya rd at t he co untry house and the building of a four-car garage. The final film shows a bullfight in Mexico in which the camera is turned on and off while the matador and bull sweep around the ring in the setting sun. In the midst o f describing one film, the narrator says, “I only remember certain words from the French I learned in school. One of those is maintenant or now, which derives from the Latin words for ‘hand’ and ‘held’ — to hold in the hand. I wondered who held the camera in the present tense, recording the moment.” F or t he ca mera o perator, t he filming is her e a nd no w. F or t he viewer, t he film represents paradoxically t he “there and t hen” in t he “here and now.” It is in the process of trying to discover that unknown operator that

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Buckingham b egins t o r ead o ne film aga inst t he o ther — to b rush hist ory against the grain, to use Walter Benjamin’s phrase.20 In Buckingham’s film installation we find ourselves at the end of a chain of events, in which these once-innovative forms of material memory have become ruins. To understand why film and other old media became part of the content of installation art in the last fifteen years, it is important to understand how we have come to think about memory in the twentieth century.

Consumers of the Latest Memory-Making Technology in 1923 It was an exciting possibility to make one’s own moving pictures and to display them at home in the early twentieth century, but the technology had to be worked out first. Kodak wanted to exploit a new market of home moviemakers, but the first step to doing this involved producing a film base that was not as likely to burst into flame as the highly inflammable nitrocellulose film used by professionals. At the beginning of the century, Kodak began work on an acetate-based 35 mm “ safety” film. By 1909, t hey had found a us able formula that involved combining cellulose with acetic hydride, which would slow the burning of the film. 21 George Eastman insisted the CinéKodak Model A camera use only the new safety film. The first Model A was p roduced in 1920, and it was finally marketed to the public in 1923 with an advertisement in the New York Tribune.22 The Kodak Company sold the cameras and film as part of a complete home movie production kit, including screen and splicer, for $325, which is only slightly less than a Ford car cost at the time. Like the family slide show later in the twentieth century, the home movie was a ne w memory ritual that would bring the family together around the home movie screen. According to Mary Ann Doane, while still photographs could render a mo ment into a visual ob ject, film was a ble to preserve the experience of duration in time i tself. “What was registered on film was lif e itself in all i ts multiplicity, diversity and contingency.”23 People wanted this marvelous technology to preserve their family’s special events. Buckingham notes in his commentary that within a few years over five hundred thousand movie-making kits had been sold. In researching the production codes found on the edges of the film he finds, Buckingham discovers that each of the film stocks was made in the early 1920s and early 1930s. We can assume then that the family that produced the films was able to afford a home movie camera as

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soon as it came out and to use it to record the banal moments of a summer afternoon and an overseas vacation. The fact that the family who made these films owned a home movie camera in t he 1920s indica tes both how wealthy they were and that they used their wealth to buy the latest technology. To buy such products marks the consumer as up to date and sophisticated. The theorist Jean Baudrillard observed that there is a n obligation for consumers to buy the newest and the latest.24 Having the knowledge and power to buy the most innovative products is the means by which consumers differentiate themselves from others. The middle-class man who was able to buy the latest movie equipment distinguished himself from his less technology-sophisticated peers and was rewarded both with a s ense of individual superiority and with the novel and liberating effects of the new technology. The result of such enthusiasm, based on a desire to preserve memories and to distinguish oneself socially, had predictable results: an ever-growing cache of recordings, films, and images made by amateurs. As I have noted earlier, cultural observers commented on the accumulating pile of photographic records in t he twentieth century, w hich burst t he dams of memory and rendered mnemonic technology useless for the individual. Memories were soon relegated to various kinds of archives, administered by institutions, or left to rot in attics and basements. The transfer of memory to machines represents simply another example of new media technology. Memory had b ecome a kind o f problem in t he early twentieth century, and this understanding is reflected in the way it is described by writers. For Walter B enjamin, t he ne w t echnology o f p hotography a nd esp ecially film had transformed memory and experience. He discerned a duality of memory, which turns on the relationship of technology to the body. The first type of memory is rooted in the body and based on perception. It is woven out of the threads of sensuous experience. The second type of memory corresponds to the photograph and other forms of recording media, such as film. This duality is als o reflected in t he two kinds o f installation, the bodily/experiential and the archival, that this book has been discussing. Bodily memo ry, f or B enjamin, is ex emplified b y M arcel P roust’s ico nic scene o f t he t asting o f t he madeleine co okie in his b ook Remembrance of Thing s Past.25 Proust, after trying and failing to recall his childhood, takes a bite of the sweet cookie and immediately relives a moment from his childhood

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when he a te these treats while drinking tea at his a unt’s house. This happy moment returned to him wi th all t he complexity of a li ve experience, engaging his senses and imagination. Bodily memory is a fleeting sensation of wholeness and pleasure in what is Proust’s otherwise dull exercise in recollection. Bodily memory is a cluster of associations that cling to a perception. In bodily memory, one becomes aware of the network of memories and sensations that are tied to this perception. It is an experience of memory that declines as t he function of remembering is t aken over by photography, sound recording, and film, according to Benjamin. The transformation of memory is emblematic of the transformation of experience in the modern world. Genuine experience according to Benjamin can now only be evoked distantly via art in poetic “correspondences,” which are the fusion of sound, sight, smell, and touch possible through art. The type of memory that Benjamin associates with “correspondences” is ep hemeral. Poetry is o ne way of achieving this fusion, but perhaps Benjamin would have seen installation art as another means. To contrast bodily and archival memory, Benjamin refers to Proust’s dissatisfaction with his attempts to recall his experience of Venice. He describes the retrieved memories as a collection of photographs. Photography records all of the visual inf ormation of a past mo ment without any other sensuous data, thus freezing and isolating it. The takeover of the practice of memory by photography and film, for those early twentieth-century critics, is a symptom of the decline of genuine experience in modernity. Photography in Benjamin’s argument is symptomatic of mechanization, the one-touch action of the modern world, and of the growing anonymity of the masses. All o f the social and cultural relationships and experiences symbolized by the experience of bodily memory dissolve as t he more anonymous realm of archival and photographic memory expands. However, photography also distances us from the past in a way that we can question it. It also serves as a foil to the powerful effects of ritual, which Benjamin sees as a me ans of unthinkingly holding in place certain beliefs, customs, and rules. In Buckingham’s film installation, Situation Leading to a Story (1999), he notes that the Kodak moving picture manual urged its readers to understand that “your movie camera exists to preserve life not to destroy it.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the anxiety and excitement generated by industrialization was exemplified by the response to the possibilities

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of photographic technology.26 Photography was seen as something that preserves but also destroys. In the photographic portrait, the individual, already absent, is r educed to the parameters of a spa tial situation. In an old snapshot, it is not the actual individuality of the person depicted but the clothing and jewelry the sitter wears, the conventional and socially determined posing, and the spatialization of a moment of time. The photographic portrait is only an array of things. In photography, as we have discussed in reference to the documentation of installation art, an experience that includes all of the senses is reduced to a visual document bounded by a frame. It is an evocation of death. The transfer of memory and experience to material records has had a profound impact on our c ulture. If hist ory is co nceived as ma terial residues, the social relationships that form history are hidden within the concrete we walk on, the clothes we wear, and the books and stories we read. Thes e objects do not appear as historical evidence of social relationships because we have forgotten their true origin as t he work of other people. Whether from the madeleine cookie or the old arcades, the fragments of text from the past reveal in their materiality these barely remembered social relationships. The decline of bodily memory represents a loss of a certain kind of access to the past t hat requires work to recover. Film a nd photography, t herefore, were the new technologies that spelled the end o f certain ways of experiencing and remembering. The person who encounters a film, the Buckingham work suggests, must go through the effort to redeem this material for history. As Mary Ann Doane notes, film records e vents indis criminately and t herefore r isks opacity and meaninglessness by gathering a heap of useless historical details.27 The films Buckingham finds seem to have this quality of randomness. The narrator of Situation Leading to a Story explains the efforts that he made to put these film fragments together and to render them meaningful, historical materials. The effort involves not only the preservation of the film and the research about its production but also the search for the places and individuals connected to it. The films must be placed in their original context to be meaningful — a context that involves a web of social, economic, and material relationships. To that end, Buckingham visits an address in upstate New York in Ossining near the legendary Sleepy Hollow. In the process, he encounters various forms of history, b oth its revival and its erasure. He meets a mis erable historical

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F I G U R E 4 . 4 M atthew Buckingham, Situation Leading to a Story, 1999, Film still. Film installation. © Matthew Buckingham. Courtesy of the Murray Guy Gallery.

reenactor employed at the author Washington Irving’s home. And he discovers t hat t he t own o f O ssining, New York, c hanged i ts na me f rom S ing Sing, which derives from the Native American name for the place, in order to distance itself from Sing Sing Prison. Buckingham goes deeper into the background of the intriguing film titled Peru. The narrator is able to analyze these films in such a way that, through them, we see the relationships among individuals in the past. 28 He tells the story of t he C erro de P asco C ompany in P eru, w hich was o rganized by a group of wealthy New York business people in 1901, a round the time t hat the Kodak Company was conducting research on “safety film.” The y bought up ba nkrupt co pper-mining co mpanies in P eru a nd p roduced a p owerful American-run business. The film shows the company and its local employees building a tramway through the Andes in the 1920s. The film could have been used to promote the company in s ome capacity. The harsh working conditions at the mine, we learn, inspired the organization of labor unions, and the

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company poisoned the land and water around the mine and then profited by buying it up for reduced prices. We follow the story of this company up until the 1970s w hen i t b ecomes na tionalized b y a ne w r evolutionary Peruvian government. Buckingham’s narrative does the work of uncovering these social relationships embedded in the film. He never connects it directly, but the narrator’s research again raises the question of whether this too is the source of the happy family’s wealth in Garden. Because he ca n’t find dir ect hist orical co nnections, B uckingham finally wants to track down someone who would remember the connection among the films. In the end, he searches in the Manhattan phone book for Harrison Dennis, whose name he found on the films, and, much to his surprise, finds him. The narrator wants to describe the films to Dennis, to jog his memory. But when he gets on the phone with him, the man hurriedly states he doesn’t remember the films, then becomes annoyed, and hangs up the phone. The only t hing t hat co nnects t hese films f or cer tain, finally, i s th at th ey w ere thrown away. Someone wanted to forget them and perhaps the memories that connect t hem. D espite t he effort to recover t his history, t he p erson w hose memories would connect to this history refuses to own them. Buckingham’s story, full of fits and starts, remembering and forgetting, and discoveries and disappearances, demonstrates one way of trying to uncover the s ocial and c ultural relationships embedded in e very artifact of history. The unresolved quality of the story suggests that it is far more diffic ult to knit a story together out of fragments than one would expect. At one point, he says, “Narrative is a chain of events in a cause and effect relationship occurring in time a nd space. The plot of an event is selected from the events of a story.” The home movies, he says, do not constitute a narrative, and in a certain s ense, t he na rrator’s st ory is fa r t oo f ragmentary t o mak e o ne ei ther. Therefore, the films have become mute materials, subject to decay as much as any other kind of historical artifact. These materials, used to preserve individual memory, have enabled that memory to be disavowed and “forgotten.” The transfer of the task of recording memory and exp erience to machines and materials represents a kind o f forgetting. The theorist Theo dor Adorno explains his co ncerns about the effects of industrial production, mass p roduction, or reification on society to Walter Benjamin in a 1940 letter in these terms: “For all r eification is a f orgetting: objects become purely thing-like the moment they are retained for us without the continued presence of their

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other aspects: when something of them has b een forgotten. This raises the question as to how far this forgetting is one that is capable of shaping experience, which I would almost call epic forgetting, and how far it is a reflex forgetting.”29 If the evidence of history is found in the materials and objects we use everyday, the technique of machine production allows this evidence to be forgotten. And what we learn, ironically, from Buckingham’s work, is that the materials and practices of new photographic technologies, which once threatened the disappearance of traditional forms of memory, must now be rescued and preserved. Pierre Nora, a French historian, wrote the article “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” in 1989, and his assessment of the challenge of archival memory seems to ring true for an earlier moment in the century. Nora’s memory is o ne of ritual and tradition that is no w mostly gone. The little that is left remains under pressure from archival memory. Natural, collective memory has b een pressed into and maintained in a reas and objects Nora describes as lieux de mémoire. The conclusions of Buckingham’s work contradict those of Pierre Nora. He claims that memory is endangered, pointing to the recent scramble in academia a nd the broader culture to examine memory in all its forms. And it is in danger from archival memory. But archival memory too is in da nger of disappearing and requires preservation and redemption. Buckingham and Dean’s filmic archives and films for archives suggest t hat film, r ecording m aterials, a nd s till p hotographs, ra ther th an threats to memory, have become endangered “evocative objects.”

Outmoded Media as “Evocative Objects” That film has b ecome an “evocative object” is sug gested by the installation arrangement of Buckingham’s work. The installation of Situation Leading to a Story had a distinc tive setup that Buckingham designed in order to encourage viewers to focus on the outmoded, material qualities of the film technology. The film projection and the film projector were placed in two different rooms. In the 2009 exhibition of the piece at the Museum of Contemporary Art in D enver, the artist used an Eiki Slim Line projector with the film reel held o n a ho rizontal p latform a bove t he p rojector wi th tw o flywheels extended in either direction. In this arrangement, it was possible to watch the 8 mm film as it threaded its way from film reel through projector. The viewer

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could examine the individual frames of film as they passed. The very fascination of the film projector as an object, as in Dean’s work, suggests that it is no longer an everyday piece of equipment but has become an artifact of history. The arrangement of the installation is significant because it frames the different encounters with the film apparatus differently: sound, equipment, and image each have their own space. Buckingham explained that he a rranged the components of the piece so that one would hear the audio on the film first, then encounter the film projector as it ran, and finally turn a corner and see the projected image. In the installation, a small window was cut close to the bottom of the wall t hrough which the projector cast i ts relatively small projection. When viewers walked down a short hallway and entered the projection r oom, th ey saw th at th e film was p rojected in t he fa rthest b ottom corner of the room. The artist explained that he wanted people to enter the room in a line, stack up to watch the film, and then follow the same path out. In the exhibition in Denver, the speakers were not outside the room but inside and facing toward the projection. In this arrangement, viewers seemed to be reluctant to move past the speakers. Instead, they watched the film projection from a distance, as if the space was truly a private space in which only certain people were allowed to watch the films — like a home movie. Nevertheless, Buckingham is always amused that when people are comfortable they want to stand in the light of the projector in Situation and to cast shadows on the film projection. Sound too is k ey to these works. As Tacita Dean remarked, “When I p ut the sound of a dog ba rking or a mo torbike passing at dusk, I a m so aware of  the f eeling o f a bandonment t hat i t ca n cr eate. It’s incr edibly p owerful, sound.”30 The s ounds in t he installation reveal t he difference b etween t he digital present and the recent past w hen film was an ordinary event. It isn’t possible to observe as well how a digital projector works, and although there is always the roar of the fan in a digital projector, the distinctive click, click, click of the film sprockets is absent. In writing about an exhibition of Tacita Dean’s work, James Quandt quotes her as s aying, “Analog, it seems, is a description of all the things I hold dear.”31 As explanation of this, Quandt goes on to say that digital imagery is “insubstantial, endlessly transmutable, there but not there.” In Tacita Dean’s work and in Buckingham’s, the sound of the projector and its fan is audible in the projection room reminding viewers of the material presence of the media.

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F I G U R E 4 . 5 M atthew Buckingham, Situation Leading to a Story, 1999. Installation view at PS1. Film installation. © Matthew Buckingham. Courtesy of the Murray Guy Gallery.

Sound is also a key component in many of Renée Green’s works. If Green’s works seem to embody a photographic archive, they also comprise a sound recording archive. Green’s installations and films are studded with various sound experiences. Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts addressed the intersection of personal memory and history in the 1970s via music. She shot a video to accompany the installation. It opens with sequences of found footage, a fairground carousel, Green’s Super 8 film footage of Cleveland, video c lips of protesters in B erlin in t he 1960s, a nd scenes from a 1970 M ick Jagger film. These sho ts a re in terspersed wi th imag es o f r ecord alb um co vers a nd t he sounds of music of the period. The section of the installation Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts titled Simulated Vinyl Diary included a set of record albums from the 1970s, a turntable, and he adphones The a rrangement in vited vie wers t o r elax a nd en joy t he

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music of the 1970s while coming up with their own memories and associations with the time. The title of this section suggests that this music forms the s oundtracks a nd memo ries o f millio ns o f li ves. This p roduces a s ense of identification among viewers that has implications for understanding the formation of identity in the last few decades. The most str iking example of this in Green’s video Partially Buried is the several-minutes-long sequence of music by Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Miles that accompanies a shot of a person looking through albums. The film then cuts to images of the hill w here students were shot at Kent State University in 1970. The music represents the collective idealism of the 1970s, for which many are nostalgic, while the images recall the extinguishing of those collective hopes. The sequence represents the tension inherent in B enjamin’s notion of the “wish image.” In Green’s video and installation, the enjoyment of pop music is connected to mass protest and political revolution and its aftermath in the 1970s. Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts stages the tension between individual memory and collective history, as well as the nostalgia evoked by the material qualities of mass-produced objects in the twentieth century. The film is also full of sounds typical of the 1970s. The tick and whir of film moving t hrough a p rojector acco mpanies G reen’s S uper 8 f ootage o f t he K ent State University campus. The distinctive sound of a record needle dropping into a vin yl gr oove i s h eard acco mpanied b y p ops o f s tatic a s th e n eedle moves across the surface of an album. The inclusion of such characteristic sounds in the video emphasizes the material and sensory encounter with objects produced and used at an earlier period of time. The sounds embody and evoke for many the sense of idealism of that time. The madeleine of t he twenty-first century may b e t he s ound of a needle dropping on a record or film ticking through a projector. The connection that we have to these mass-produced objects through our bodies points to the fact that w e w ere tra ined t o us e t hem in a co nsumer c ulture t hat no w deem s them obsolete. These mass-produced consumer products shaped daily habits, s ocial p ractices, a nd finally t he memo ries o f co untless indi viduals. A s we have seen in Dean’s film Kodak and in Buckingham’s Situation Leading to a  Story, it is in t he passing of cer tain media t hat t hey b ecome interesting again — strange but hauntingly familiar. This turn toward the past has inspired some observers to suggest that nostalgia may now be a f orm of critique in art.32

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Buckingham’s films are silent but narrated with the story of their recovery, that is, t he artist’s efforts to research their origins and his failure to knit together this history. In the process of listening to this, the viewer realizes that Buckingham reads one film against the next — opening up possibilities for historical coincidence and connection, drawing together places such as upstate New York and the Andes, a nd emphasizing these materials’ origins in specific times and places. In this way, Situation Leading to a Story shares qualities with Renée Green’s video piece Partially Buried Continued as well.

History and Memory as Sensory Experiences Thirty years after McCall made Line Describing a Co ne, he was in a r oundtable discussion with Matthew Buckingham on the occasion of Chrissie Iles’s exhibition of projected image art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. At one p oint in t he dis cussion, McCall noted t hat most o f t he artists w ho worked with film in the 1960s were completely self-taught, having come out of backgrounds in sculpture and painting. “And we approached it as material, much like one would approach the use of any sculptural material.”33 Buckingham responds to this by saying how his generation of artists was educated in the history and theory of film. For him, this education and background led him to read in history and in other fields that related to documentary film. It is clear that the generation of conceptual artists and their interest in the materiality of film had an impact on Buckingham’s work. But Buckingham’s film installations, like Dean’s, highlight the materiality of film not simply as a medium but also as a historical object. His work appeals to the viewer’s sense of smell, touch, and hearing, as much as to the sense of sight. While he engages the viewer’s senses with his work, Buckingham hopes also to get viewers to reflect with him on the process of constructing a narrative history from material remains. As I noted earlier, the projected image installation brings together present and past. The video installation, Margaret Morse argues, is the strange combination of the here and now of the viewer’s body with the there and then of the photographic image. It is in t he examination of the break b etween the two that the viewer begins to ask questions about memory and the way experience has b een shaped by photographic media. It also turns the viewer’s focus from the image alone to the entire moving image apparatus (projector,

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image, sound, and the space in which it is shown). The object that had been considered two dimensional and visual, the photograph, becomes three dimensional and haptic, t actile, aural, and e ven olfactory in t he installation context. In Dean and Buckingham’s works, this examination sparked by a bodily exp erience ra ises q uestions a bout obs olescence in t echnology a nd how obsolescence shapes the perception of history. These installations make historical objects physically present, as Hal Foster says. The philosopher F. R. Ankersmit argues that in nostalgia the past and present are experienced in t he same moment and in t he same space. Nostalgic historical experience is the individual sensuous experience of the past in the present. Ankersmit calls t his a “sublime” experience of the past: “Historical experience pulls the faces of past and present together in a short but ecstatic kiss. Historical exp erience is, in t his way, a ‘ surface’ phenomenon: It t akes place on the surface or interface where the historian and the past meet each other.”34 The encounter of t he past in t he “meeting of sur faces” sug gests t hat t he sense of touch, smell, and sound are more important than sight. When one experiences the past in this way, one undergoes the same sensations experienced some time in the distant past. History as surface in Ankersmit’s reading does not render the past a shallow, hollow phenomenon but instead represents physical contact with the past that overcomes the gap between subject and object, history and the present, through bodily memory. Experience takes place in t he contact b etween the surfaces of things. It is t he aural, tactile, olfactory, and even visual contact with outmoded objects that provokes the sense of nostalgia. It is the intensity and emotional tinge of the experience of nostalgia that intrigues Ankersmit. He even argues that nostalgia provides the most authentic experience of the past. Nostalgia is at the same time a p owerful experience that is e asily used to manipulate for the purpose of selling products, to create false allegiances, or to soothe prematurely worries about present conditions. And it is startling to realize t hat ma ny co llective exp eriences of nost algia in t he last pa rt of the twentieth century are inspired and organized around the consumption of mass-produced consumer goods. In the era of mass production and mass media, millions of individuals are likely to have used objects, such as cassette tapes, home movie cameras, and vinyl l ps, in the same way at the same time. Our bodies and senses have been shaped by the collective engagement and

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use of mass-produced objects. Nostalgia is a s ensuous exp erience, I a rgue, following Ankersmit, that involves the body of the viewer who uses the massproduced objects that Adorno disdained as vehicles of forgetting. Activities such as p utting he adphones on one’s he ad, he aring film pass t hrough t he sprockets of a projector, and smelling slide film heat up as it is warmed by a bulb become ways of reflecting on the passage of time. All of t hese s ensations are produced by t he material qualities of objects that have b een mass p roduced. M illions o f p eople have exp erienced t hese sensations when using these objects. It is because of this that, when encountering these objects and materials once they become outmoded, we tend to respond with a pleasant and surprising feeling of recognition — a recognition that can even span differences among cultures and classes in contemporary society. This nostalgia reveals something about the viewer’s relationship to the past and to other individuals. The installations described in t his chapter, including Buckingham’s function as f rames f or e vocative ob jects, or heterotopia—as I dis cussed in t he introduction—spaces in w hich disparate places and times in tersect via t he objects and materials they contain. Michel Foucault names, as exa mples of heterotopia, museums, a rchives, a nd lib raries w here “time acc umulates,” a phenomenon that he a rgues is uniq ue to modernity.35 But he als o includes the movie theater, which encapsulates both different places and times in the form of film. By producing an intersection of times a nd places using these outmoded forms of media, these installations reveal that photographic media, which Benjamin had des cribed as a f oil to bodily memory, can, when they become outmoded, engage viewers’ senses and bodies and become experiential mnemonic devices. Analog film and photography now evoke bodily memories.

Media Nostalgia in Contemporary Art There have been many examples of artists using media as a device for memory and nostalgia in recent exhibitions. In 2005, the Guggenheim Museum in New York acquired Slater Bradley’s Doppelganger Trilogy (2001–2004), which was a sentimental and nostalgic piece about the artist’s childhood heroes. The video installation took several rooms and focused on the artist’s fascination

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with 1980s pop stars. Each of the videos imitated the various media in which the pop stars were originally filmed — from Super 8 film to the grainy videotape of portable, handheld cameras in the 1990s. Another exhibition the same year at the Baltimore Museum of Art focused on slide p rojectors and slide shows in a rt practice. The exhibition presented works produced in t he last part of the twentieth century, from Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1966– 1967) to a recent work by Peter Fischli and David Weiss using slides of flowers and mushrooms displayed by timed projectors. The 2006 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial provided examples of media nostalgia as well. Many of the selections for the year included film installations in which the projector was placed in the installation space. Examples include Diana Thater and T. Kelly Mason’s Jump (2004), w hich featured two happy things from Thater’s childhood: the Bob Dylan song “Subterranean H omesick B lues” a nd j ump r oping. The w ork inc luded a film projector, colorful bulletin boards, and recorded music. The same edition of the Whitney featured Rodney Graham’s Torqued Chandelier Release (2005), a sin gle-room film in stallation t hat disp layed a n ela borate film projector projecting a nearly still image of a crystal chandelier.36 As these exhibitions were taking place, as I ha ve noted, Kodak and other companies were eliminating t he production of analog film. The us e of old film a nd slide p rojectors, vintage video, a nd other o ld recording media in works of art highlight the shift from the analog to digital media. Thes e machines, t apes, vin yl r ecords, a nd films ha ve b ecome f ragments a nd r uins pointing to a ne wly estranged past. The transition to digital media in t he 2000s seems to parallel the point in the early twentieth century when Walter Benjamin observed photography and film to have marked a decisi ve break with the older cultural forms of painting and the graphic arts. Thes e analog media have colonized our unconscious, been objects of desire, and shaped our exp eriences. This ne w p erspective b ecomes a pparent in t hese in stallations that deliberately frame the material qualities of these media. We see in the late twentieth century that the viewer’s encounter with these objects is more like Benjamin’s bodily memory, which photography and film was supposed to destroy. Therefore, perhaps digital media has b ecome a new foil to these outmoded objects and materials, as p hotography had b een for traditional forms of memory.

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Tony Cokes’s Headphones How do we regard nostalgia and old media in the period of transition to digital a nd do wnloadable media? T ony C okes’s video in stallation ti tled Headphones from 2004 demo nstrates the way nostalgia in t he 2000s ill uminates this transition most clearly. His videos focus on the culture of pop music, and they often co mbine recorded music and textual elements. Cokes was b orn in 1959 and received an mf a degree from Virginia Commonwealth University. He also attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in the 1980s. Cokes has w orked for two decades in video a rt and is w ell known for t he video work of X-pr z in the 1990s. The video p iece titled Headphones represents Cokes’s interest in t he way technologies have organized groups a nd s ocial identities. It combines p op music and vintage marketing films by the music recording industry, which in the context of his video, should enlist the affective power of nostalgia kindled by these pop culture artifacts. However, the material qualities of the media he uses seem to be downplayed in this piece. Hence, if nostalgia is a sublime and tactile experience of the past, Cokes’s work seeks to thin that experience or, perhaps, to filter it in order to encourage the viewer to reflect on the past and its relationship to the present. Cokes uses digital video and processors to create a sense of distance between the viewer and the powerful elements of the outmoded media in his work. The piece uses archival r c a Company promotional films and text by music theorist Jacques Attali in a la yered structure. Although the vintage films inspire nostalgia in the viewer, the video frames that nostalgia in a particular way. Cokes uses nostalgia to examine the way group identity is f ormed in t he context of consumer culture and how such identities have shifted o ver the decades in t he twentieth century. In nostalgia, one can perceive collective identity produced by consumer technologies that was obscured by the isolating effect of using the technologies at the time. Via the visual structure of his video, Cokes uses this awareness to invite viewers to think about the isolating effect of current technologies and the possibility of collective hopes, the “wish image” that they now obscure. As the scratched, crackling film begins in Headphones we are invited into the home of an American family of the 1950s, j ust sitting down to listen to the latest in audio technology.

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FIGURE

4 . 6 Tony Cokes, Headphones, 2004, video still. Image: Scott Pagano for Tony Cokes

2005. Courtesy of the artist.

They are white, middle class, and beaming with excitement. Father, mother, and daughter sit in a sleek and modern living room. As dad gives a large cassette t o his y oung da ughter t o p lay o n t he t ape p layer, t he m usic sw ells and the narrator gushes over the simplicity of the new recording technology. The film, dating f rom t he late 1950s, is a p romotional piece made b y t he production co mpany J am H andy f or t he r c a C ompany’s t hen inno vative audio-recording cartridge, and it presents this scene of idealized white and middle-class normality as if it were made possible by consuming the latest in electronic products. As with most c ultural artifacts intended to exhibit the latest in t echnology, the vintage film is no w strongly marked as o utmoded and naive. The advertisement for r c a ’s cassette-recording device that begins Cokes’s video seems most archaic because it suggests that a family would sit down in the living room together to enjoy a piece of recorded music. Thi s archaic social p ractice p oints t o C okes’s r eal sub ject ma tter — the s ocial effect of

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recorded music. Recording has tra nsformed music from a co llectively enjoyed, p erformance-based medi um t o a medi um t hat millio ns o f is olated individuals wi th he adphones co nsume. The video em phasizes t hat t his is made possible by mechanical, electrical, and now digital reproduction. Nostalgia is usually considered an individual experience, which might be the reason to discount it as a means to access collective historical experience. However, nost algia r eveals t he co nnections b etween indi viduals t hat had been possible in the context of mass media and mass culture in the twentieth century. It does so in at least two ways. First, nostalgic experience shows us that we have been organized into groups with common interests by the products we consumed. Nostalgia is a means of consolidating an individual sense of self.37 However, one of the characteristics that Elizabeth E. G uffey notes about the consumption of outmoded objects is t hat subcultures often f orm around these products. When various consumers of such products were interviewed about their interest in o ld things — ranging from those who buy vintage clothes to those who frequent Irish pubs — they continuously cited social connection and identification as one of the primary pleasures of nostalgia. In the realm of consumer culture, nostalgia conjures a s ense of connection among p eople who watched the same t v shows, b ought the same things, or listened to the same music. Having defined themselves through the products they consume, consumers in turn identify with each other through those same products when they are old. Thus, the product by which we distinguish ourselves from others when it is new becomes the product by which we identify with others as we get old. Second, it also directly involves individual bodies. Individuals had to learn to use new technologies or to appreciate the latest music. It was necessary to train one’s hands and ears to enjoy vinyl records or to project films at home. As Tony Cokes points out, many of the products for which we are now nostalgic were used to make certain strange, new activities, like watching home movies or listening to music in your living room, normal and expected.38 The intensity of the experience of nostalgia in consumer culture derives from the bodily experiences and feelings produced in consuming these objects of mass culture. The training and practice to use these objects has transformed them into “evocative objects.” In Cokes’s video, the father turning over his domain of the use and enjoyment of high-tech objects to a little girl is me ant to underline the simplicity

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of this piece of home-recording equipment. It also symbolizes the way the paternalistic recording industry has given naive consumers the power to record their own music. The use of these consumer products reinforced social stratification and division, even as they produced groups. As the first piece of film ends, the title Headphones comes on screen with the words “transcription of a transcription . . . copy of a copy.” As an extension of this mythical story of Promethean distribution, Cokes emphasizes that each film and piece of music in his video ca n be found as a n individual downloadable copy on the Internet available to millions, and the artist includes the digital file names for each. This introduction leads into another piece of archival r c a promotional film by Jam Handy titled New Dimensions in Sound, which dates from the late 1950s and promoted the company’s innovative stereophonic sound systems. Both pieces of film come from a time in r c a ’s postwar history when it was aggressively expanding its market in ho me musical equipment and recordings. In 1949, in response to Columbia Music’s development of the 331/3 rpm vinyl record, r c a came out with its own 45 rpm extended-playing vinyl record and followed it with a turntable that could play records of both speeds. In 1958, r c a developed the technology for stereophonic sound.39 As each new technology was r eleased, t he corporation had t o build a ne w market for it and teach consumers why it was better and how to use the new equipment. In this twenty-minute monaural film, an affable hidden na rrator talks to several middle-class white men, all played by the same actor. As each character looks almost exac tly alike, the film suggests that, even as consumer culture is olates indi viduals, it encourages a typ e of conformity. The narrator interrogates e ach ma n, w ho is alo ne a nd list ening t o m usic in his li ving room, about his obsession with high-fidelity, home-recording and playback equipment. The last few minutes of the film, however, shows a flight over the Grand Canyon that has no soundtrack. The producer intended the music for this segment to be supplied by the projectionist on new r c a home stereophonic eq uipment. The flight o ver t he G rand C anyon a ims t o s educe t he viewer with pleasant, new sound quality and images that, combined, suggest freedom through new technology. Cokes chose only these last few minutes to include in his video. In one version of the work, it was p rojected onto a s creen in a galler y on an averagesized wall at the scale of a large landscape painting. Projected at this size, the

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film of the Grand Canyon creates the illusion of flying along with the music, soaring o ver t he r ock r idges a nd floating o ver t he r iver t housands o f f eet below, moving freely through open air. The images, in fact, would have complemented the stereophonic sound, which unlike monaural sound, seems to come to listeners in three dimensions. The film and sound would have generated a sublime sensation of moving through open air that consumers would associate with r c a ’s new stereo technologies, encouraging consumers to associate them with transcendence and, perhaps, even the possibility of escape from the pressures of modern, middle-class life. We see in this film clip a convincing example of a wish image, which expresses the hopes of freedom and happiness through consumerism and technology. Of course, the vinyl l p, the turntable, and the cassette tape have now become mostly obsolete — dispatched to the realm of novelty — as have analog photography and film. After dominating the recording industry for several decades, the vinyl l p was challenged by the introduction of compact discs in the 1980s, and compact discs have now been challenged by the introduction of mp3s and downloadable digital files. Although vinyl records have recently experienced a r evival with sales increasing by double digits in t he last f ew years,40 they seem now to be a connoisseur’s object. Vinyl l ps are art objects in the work of Christian Marclay and others. For instance, an exhibition of work b y co ntemporary a rtists w ho us e r ecords o pened a t t he I nstitute o f Contemporary Art in B oston in 2011. These are now evocative objects rich enough in terms of cultural memory and nostalgia to inspire works of art.

The Complexity of Nostalgia For viewers in t he twenty-first century, the r c a film is kitsch, nostalgia, or perhaps in the context of Cokes’s video, what the design historian Elizabeth Guffey calls “retro.” In the last half o f the twentieth century, as in t he nineteenth, there has been a preoccupation with preservation. But rather than the great monuments of the past, the interest in preservation now extends as well to the ephemeral aspects of popular culture and fashion. Old styles, like old movies, return to satisfy the thirst for authenticity.41 This interest stepped up in the 1970s. For, rather than blindly consuming whatever was newest on the market, consumers in the 1970s and after demonstrated an awareness of the quick turnovers of styles, commodities, and designs and reacted to it. Eliza-

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beth Guffey distinguishes pure nostalgia from what she calls “ retro,” which she designates as a fondness for the past that is tempered by self-awareness. The word “retro” first appeared, according to Guffey, in t he context of the most future-oriented program in t he 1960s: t he American space p rogram. It was a word used in association with John Glenn’s dangerous space flight in the Mercury capsule in 1962 in w hich he had t o us e “retro” rockets to slow the descent of his capsule to earth. The word “retro” entered common speech in the early 1970s when cultural observers noted disillusionment with modernism’s f ocus o n “futurism.” I n r etro, t here is a n a wareness a nd s elfconsciousness about one’s historical position in relation to outmoded styles and objects. If nostalgia represents for Guffey a self-aware consumption of “retro” products, for Fredric Jameson, nostalgia is symptomatic of a problem. Jameson’s description of nostalgia differs from Guffey’s and from Ankersmit’s in that it represents a failure of cultural memory and a giving in to the forces of consumerism. He was r esponding to the wave of nostalgia that swept through American s ociety in t he 1970s a nd 1980s. I t was a time , in fac t, t hat s ociologist Fred Davis described as a nostalgia epidemic. He cited the revival of fashions from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as popular nostalgic films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Last Picture Show, Amarcord, Jules and Jim, a nd t o s ome ext ent, Bonnie a nd Cl yde.42 I n t he 1970s, i t s eemed every era of history was available for appropriation by the t v drama. Fredric Jameson seemed to despair of the critical power of cultural memory at this time. He argued that films such as Something Wild and Blue Velvet are not stories about people so much as t hey are “allegorical narrative(s) in which the 1950s meet the 1980s.”43 In such films, the historical context of the eras is str ipped and packaged into easily consumed stereotypes.44 Rich historical narrative was r educed to t he melo drama of stock figures signifying different historical periods. The sense of time a nd history seemed to have changed under the influence of the mass media.45 Mass media reduce memory t o a t hin sur face p henomenon.46 R ather t han responding t o authentic historical conditions, the postmodernist work of art used recycled recording materials of the past in a new antihistorical pastiche. And the postmodernist form of art, par excellence, according to Jameson, was experimental video.47 Film, on the other hand, remains a medium that has the depth and richness to continue to harbor cultural memory.

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For Jameson, video represents the evacuation of historical perspective. In video, he argues, it is not possible to obtain a sense of distanced perspective that is an inherent part of memory. Jameson designates this quality of video “total flow,” where there is no pause or break left in the structure of video to allow for reflection. Nostalgia is the reduction of complex cultural memory to a thin, transient sign of history.

Critical Historical Perspective in Cokes’s Video Tony C okes’s Headphones seems to respond to this criticism of the immediacy of video b y using t he flexibility of digital video t o create a f ormal and critical distance in the viewers’ encounter with the 1950s film. The viewer is distanced from the seductive material qualities of the old promotional films by the video’s layered structure. While viewers feel as if t hey are flying over the Grand Canyon, recent music by the electropop band Static begins to play, and text rolls across the screen emphasizing its two-dimensional materiality. The projection surface becomes a sur face in t he viewer’s space. The music too disrupts the film, as i t is slower than the film images suggest — there is no sw ell o f u plifting o rchestral m usic. I n C okes’s video , w e m ust lo ok a t several la yers sim ultaneously, wa tching t he digi tized film imag es o f flight over the Grand Canyon, listening to the contrasting soundtrack, and reading the scrolling text. We experience the sublime landscape by looking through and beyond words. The simple structure of layering presents a c hallenge to the vie wer, as i t is im possible to pay attention to more t han one layer at a time. In this way, Cokes sets us in a distanced position to view the rhetorical tactics of the film, by rupturing its illusion of naturalistic, three-dimensional space via the flattening stream of Attali’s text, and asking us to read the image. The text in Cokes’s video is based on Attali’s 1985 book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, and it reinforces the visual structure of the video. It argues that music organizes sound in a ma nner similar to the way society is o rganized. In music, harmony is produced by the elimination of conflict. In society, conflict is eliminated by an organization of social hierarchies. Marketing strategies emphasize the unique identity that one could obtain by consuming the newest and latest. These technologies on display in Headphones, however, have become nostalgic markers that situate the present in relation to the past. They don’t absorb the viewer in an ecstatic sensory expe-

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rience of the past, as suggested by the idea of a sublime historical experience, because the digital video flattens out the sensuous experience of the original film. In turn, this distance frames the old advertising films as ironic. In viewing t hese o utmoded media t hrough filters p rovided b y C okes, t he vie wer notes that the dream of collective transcendence that was promised to consumers by technologies was a dr eam. His us e of t hese bits of archival film is ironic. We see a wish imag e revealed as a n illusion, a fals e substitute for a desire. The advertisements are clearly manipulations of people’s hopes. In Cokes’s w ork, vie wers obs erve t heir own response t o t hese o ld media a nd think about it. It is in the awareness of common identity produced by nostalgia t hat o ne ca n s ee t he ways t hat t echnologies o rganized a nd shaped t he memories and identities of millions of people.

Analog Media F. R. Ankersmit’s idea of historical experience is a multisensory one in which the senses of touch, hearing, and smell are involved. This notion of historical experience contradicts the idea that the development of archival or machineproduced memory permanently escapes the investment of libidinal energies that B enjamin a nd others p erceived in t he outmoded objects of t heir day. If the camera replaces the storyteller, and the slide show replaces the village festival, the early critics of technology believed, the practices of remembrance would disappear. Both Fredric Jameson and Pierre Nora take this position. But these critics fail to note that the new technologies of the twentieth century generated their own rituals and practices that, in t urn, developed new sorts of collective identity and evocative objects. It is important to note that these rituals, and memories are now generated and shaped by consumer culture and no longer solely by the social relationships among individuals. However, rather than flattening and stripping the sensuous experience of memory permanently, analog media in photography and sound have shaped experience and memory in a way novel for the twentieth century. With outmoded, evocative objects, the experience of the past becomes a comparative practice. The brief and overwhelming sensuous encounter with the past in the form of an object, a sound, or smell is quickly followed by comparison of the past to the present. In this way, as the works discussed in this chapter suggest, outmoded media can provide both an intense experience of the past as

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well as t he possibility for gaining a cr itical perspective on that past and the present. For instance, the sense of collective identity observable in the nostalgic response to these objects is felt often only in retrospect. This says something important about t he effect of ne w media o n s ocial relationships and can lead to reflection on the current situation. The development of a critical perspective depends, however, on how these old media are used in these works. If Jameson argued that video was too immediate and left little space for reflection, Cokes’s piece manages to use digital video to encourage viewers to think about the relationship between the past and the present. One thing seems to connect Cokes’s strategy to the way that Benjamin described photography in the mid-1930s. The photograph is materialized memory that addresses vision and excluded other senses, thereby providing the distanced perspective to examine a moment of past time. In digital media, we don’t necessarily get the sound of film looping through a projector, or the smell of film stock heating up, or the crackle of a n eedle falling on a record. Certain material experiences of outmoded media disappear in digital media. B oth p hotography and film in t heir time co nstituted t he flattening and reduction of sensory and bodily memory, as does digital media in ours.

The Media Installation as Frame for Observing the Passage of Time Eduardo Cadava provides a succinct image of how the photograph presented the means to reread history. The materialization of memory and experience in the form of recordings and mass-produced objects presents an opportunity. The stillness of the photograph, according to Cadava, is an advantage, as it seizes and holds time. This moment of history, frozen, can be brushed to reveal its constituents, the tensions that would otherwise remain hidden. Photography names a process that, seizing and tearing an image from its context, works to immobilize the flow of history. This is why, following the exigency of the fragment or thesis, photography can be said to be another name for the arrest that Benjamin identifies with the moment of revolution. . . . This caesura — whose force of immobilization not only gives way to the appearance of an image but also intervenes in the linearity of history and politics — can be understood in relation to what we might call the photograph’s Medusa effect. 48

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Cadava later states that cutting the continuous flow of past to present and freezing it in ob ject form “enables the rereading and rewriting of history.” The f reezing o f time in p hotography is t he r eduction o f li ved a nd b odily experience to a visual artifact — a material object. It is this distanced view on lived experience that makes it possible to rethink such experiences. Note how Cadava’s des cription resembles Henri B ergson’s des cription of t he mo dern scientific understanding of time as snapshots of lived experience. However, Cadava and B enjamin draw a different conclusion about photography from Bergson. Where Bergson regards the reduction of experience as negative, Benjamin sees it as opening up possibilities. Benjamin argues that the uncertain nature of meaning, produced by the stilling of a moment in the photograph, “unsettles” viewers until they are provided with a text. It is the unsettled quality of the photograph and other recording media that enables the rereading of these forms of materialized memory. The photograph is a f ramed object — separated from what surrounds it — that because of its structure, its stillness, allows viewers to reread history or to look at history in a different way. In a pa rallel way, the installations discussed in this chapter act as frames that provide the opportunity to question how memories and desires are shaped in the current centuries. The installations function as heterotopias, in Michel Foucault’s terminology, as complex sites in w hich disparate places and times intersect. One o f the things Foucault notes about heterotopias is that these sites are isolated spaces in society linked to it “by every point.” According to Mary Ann Doane, the cinema engages many different temporalities: the mechanical rhythm of the apparatus, the temporality of the film story, and the temporality of the viewer’s experience of the work.49 In the installation space o f the gallery in w orks such as Buckingham’s and Dean’s, viewers are asked to use their bodies and to engage in a f uller sensory experience. In Cokes’s piece, the experience is enha nced not by a n en gagement wi th t he vie wer’s b ody b ut rather by t he ext ended time allowed for the viewer to read each layer of the video and to piece them together — something not possible in the traditional theater. The “white cube” of t he galler y — one o f t hose spaces s eemingly s eparated f rom s ociety — perhaps provides new dimensions to the experience of the projected image. However, w ith film a nd video in stallation in t he 2000s, t here is ra rely any questioning of the frame itself: the traditional gallery. This marks film and video installation as different from what took place in the 1970s where

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installation art was us ed to question traditional ways of exhibiting work. If this is an unfortunate concession to the conventions of the art institution, it also seems to allow the content of the works — the examination of memory in the form of material objects that engage our bodies — to come forward. The white walls of the gallery frame the film experience in Dean’s and Buckingham’s work and makes it out of the ordinary. In Cokes’s piece, the work situates the action of comparison not so much among elements of the work itself but rather in the comparison between the film and its social and historical context. If t he galler y space p resented a p roblem f or t hose a rtists in terested in breaking free of the strictures of modern art in the 1960s and 1970s, for artists working with projected images in the last decade or so, the gallery installation space seems to have provided a framework to experience these images and objects in a ne w way. As these media b ecome obsolete, they acquire a powerful affect that underlines the difference between past and present. Perhaps t he 2000s a re simila r t o t he la te ninet eenth cen tury, in w hich “documents, remains, survivals, ruins and edifices, fossils — in short, indexical traces that attest to a past by merging into it — achieved a kind of epistemological prestige in an era of intensifying time consciousness.”50 Different qualities o f p hotographic media a re hig hlighted in different contexts — meaning that the critical power of any medium is dep endent on its timing and placement. The white walls of the gallery become a neutral frame once again to showcase the material qualities of these outmoded media and equipment. These installations as heterotopias allow viewers to become aware of the difference in our experience with contemporary and outmoded media. The film installation becomes the means of encountering the past in the present, allowing viewers to experience that past and to question how we represent it.

conclusion I N S TA L L AT I O N A R T A N D M E M O R Y

There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon . . . but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed. . . . Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing . . . and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you please. — Oliver Wendell Holmes

As Oli ver Wendell Holmes no ted in t he ninet eenth century, p hotographic archives preserve works but also make them mobile and available. Archives even present the possibility that the objects themselves could disappear and be replaced by their photographic replicas. In this quotation, however, Holmes does not grant that, once objects are part of archives, they are subject to the conditions and rules of these organizations of knowledge. Ultimately, archives shape our understanding of objects and events. As the photography criticism of t he tw entieth cen tury has made c lear, i t is im portant t o q uestion t hese technologies of vision, these historical devices, because they shape our memories and our understanding of history as well. Installations are often made to disappear, to become objects of history and memory. I n t his b ook, I ha ve a rgued t hat in stallations p roduce t heir o wn archives. Lisa Le Feuvre puts it very well in her a rgument about the importance of photographs and texts to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark: “Robert Pincus-Witten, for example stated, ‘You had to be there.’ I would argue that the work is in fac t all o f t hese elements and, p erhaps more importantly, it is also the spaces in b etween the pieces themselves.”1 She argues that works such as Matta-Clark’s need to be considered in terms of their existence over time, even when the original works have vanished. Such an approach means considering documentation and ephemera as part of the work. Allan Sekula and John Tagg each argued photographic meaning is a mbiguous. A p hoto-

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graph will reinforce whatever discourse in which it is used. Other artists that I have discussed in t his book have made in stallations that encourage us t o question how memory and history are constructed through objects such as photographs and archives. Renée G reen for one has de veloped a p olitics of representation based on these ideas. The heightened consciousness of ephemerality and history has b een part of the understanding of modernity since t he nineteenth century due to the rapid changes that are an inherent part of modernization. In the 1980s, Craig Owens considered t he issue o f ephemerality in t he context of mo dernity: “If the modern artist was exho rted to concentrate on the ephemeral, however, it was because it was ephemeral, that is it threatened to disappear without a trace. Baudelaire conceived modern art at least in part as the rescuing of modernity for eternity.”2 In his essay on allegory in postmodernism, Craig Owens offers the theory that modernism has always been concerned about the passage of time and, in the form of allegory, has brooded over it. Allegory, as Benjamin says, is one of the ways of saving things from disappearance in the passage of time. Following Benjamin’s description of allegory, Owens connects allegory to the photograph. It is the photograph that preserves the ephemeral incidents of modern life. And therefore, allegory is closely connected to the archive. Although site-specific art and installation art are not always identical, they often sha re t he q uality o f ep hemerality.3 In the work of Robert Smithson, Owens connects photography and site-specific art, declaring Smithson to be an allegorist. Photography’s importance in a w ork such as Spiral Jetty highlights the fragmentary nature of the work its own ephemerality and concentrates the desire to preserve the work. Photography and language in Smithson’s work, according to Owens, are both extraneous and intrinsic.4 I have argued something similar in relation to the works discussed in this book. The book traces a constellation of relationships that are revealed when one considers photography and memory in the context of installation art. The relationships b etween in stallation a rt a nd i ts p hotographic r epresentation, and the relationships between image, memory, experience, and archives, are present in the works in the 1970s. I nstallation art and site-specific art since the 1970s have raised questions about experience, memory, and representation. To paraphrase critic Ellen Handy, many installations are as sensitive to history and memory as painting is to light.5

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Perhaps it is fair to say that these postmedium practices allow for contingency, in Mary Ann Doane’s terms. Anything can be photographed; anything can b e pa rt o f in stallation a rt, p erformance, a nd s o f orth. Installation a rt distinguished itself from modernist art by expanding the limits of painting. Allan Kaprow’s environments were inspired by the large-scale paintings of American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock. According to Kaprow, Pollock destroyed painting by pushing beyond the limits of the canvas to real life.6 I n K aprow’s c haracterization, Pollock ena bled a rtists t o p ut a f rame around anything and to declare it art. The frame of Kaprow’s art came in the form of institutional sanction of the universities for whom he worked and of galleries and museums administered via photography and language. The installation work that is dis cussed in t he first chapter raises questions about the frame in the wake of Kaprow’s and others’ work in the 1960s and beyond. The works discussed take into account three principal elements derived from writings on Minimalism: the viewer, the artwork, and the space of exhibition. In many of the works discussed in t his chapter, the notion of the frame of installation expands to include the space it is produced and exhibited in, to the temporal framework of the art object and viewer’s experience, and finally to the institutional structures and systems of power in which the art is produced and viewed. Chapter 1 argues that the catalogs and photographs of a work become an institutional frame for installations. The frame of the works of installation art in the form of catalogs and published photographs comes to replace the piece once the exhibition is o ver. The photographic documentation and catalogs inevitably shape our understanding of the history of these works. It is t his aspect of photography that suggests that it is more important than mere documentation of installation art. I us ed Jacques Derrida’s term supplement to capture t he complexity of t his relationship. The notion of t he supplement reveals that there is a co ntingent quality to installation art as t here is t o a photograph: it can contain almost anything.7 Not all works of installation art take history and memory as their subject matter. But artists who are interested in them not only are concerned about “rescuing modernity for eternity” but also have used their installations cum photographic archives, collections, and even cinema spaces to ask questions about how contemporary society cultivates memory and constructs history. In installation art in the 1980s to the 2000s, memory and history are exam-

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ined via critiques of subjectivity, identity, and institutional racism, as Jennifer González has argued. Art of this sort began to include social history, anthropology, and other disciplines.8 Installation seems particularly appropriate for this work because it encourages viewers to ask questions about how they are seeing, the context of viewing, and what is being looked at. This book takes this dimension of installation art into account in the works of several artists beginning in the 1970s. The representation and understanding of history and memory is one of the important themes of Renée Green’s work, but it is als o important in different ways in Ann H amilton’s installations, Gordon Matta-Clark’s, Matthew Buckingham’s, Tacita Dean’s, and other artists discussed in this book. The time period of the 1970s where this book begins was a turning point in the interest in memory and history in art and other parts of the culture. The four chapters of this book illustrate the different aspects of installation art that are revealed when photography is taken into consideration as an aspect of t he work. Photography, as I ha ve argued, supports t he practice of installation but is also used as a critical tool in the context of installation art in the 1990s a nd 2000s. F or instance, in t he first chapter, I have considered what happens when photographs are all that remains of installation works, as in t he works displayed in t he exhibition Rooms and G ordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting. In the catalog for Rooms, what is em phasized is no t so much the individual works themselves but rather the qualities of PS1 as a n exhibition space. The catalog showcases PS1 as a ne w institution with new ideas about exhibition. In Gordon Matta-Clark’s work, the photograph becomes a way of framing time and space — marking the difference between lived experience and its representation. In the Artists Space exhibition, language takes over the role of photography in the catalog. The catalogs and artists books, as smallscale archives, have guided the history of these works. In 1980, Craig Owens described site-specific art as hybrid and discursive. The work in the 1978 Artists Space exhibition is a good example of this type of w ork. The w ork o f A drian P iper, L ouise L awler, Cind y S herman, a nd Christopher D’Arcangelo invited viewers to think about how they looked at art and understood art in the context of the particular art institution of Artists Space at a pa rticular moment in time . Adrian Piper’s piece used documentary photography in o rder to connect the fine art context to a b roader practice of looking at and reading images that has racial consequences.

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Piper’s early participation in t he conceptual art movement and her c lose friendship with Sol LeWitt were important to Green’s work. And t he influence of both artists’ work can be seen in Green’s interest in social interactions as subject matter for art as well as seriality as a f ormal device. Renée Green begins with the historical remains of Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed and in her w ork asks t he viewer to go beyond the traditional historical accounts of Smithson’s work and the pivotal day of May 4, 1970, and place them in the context of personal memory and the culture at large. In the context of this installation as a rchive, she in vites vie wers to question how t he photograph is read and how the photograph acquires meaning in particular orders. I situated Green’s work in the context of a history of photography considered as evidence in the archive by noting how photographs were collected in the nineteenth century along with other kinds of artifacts in colonialist expeditions. These archives have had social consequences in terms of race and social relationships — but also in terms of our understanding of the nineteenth century. Photography and installation art are part of Green’s critical tools. And her consideration of documentary remains in the form of photographs spurred an examination of the history of the 1970s. The documentation of installation art, nevertheless, raises problems for installation artists. Images of installation must substitute for direct experience of the work. Ann Hamilton’s work emphasizes bodily experience that includes the senses of touch, smell, hearing, and sight. The photograph represents a reduction of that multifarious and immersive experience to one of vision. For this r eason, p hotographic do cumentation b ecomes a c hallenge. N evertheless, the photographic documentation of ephermal, site-specific works of art, including performance and installation, allow them to circulate and gain status in a global art world. I link H amilton’s w ork t o M atta-Clark’s f or t heir m utual in terest in t he transformation of bodily experience to image. For Matta-Clark, this relationship becomes an important part of his w ork, out of necessity. For the most part, his works did not get exhibited in traditional art institutions and were destroyed soon after they were made. Hamilton’s are similarly ephemeral, but for her the question of experience and its representation is also part of the content of the work. The documentation of the pieces is simila rly careful. Other works of art interested in t he present-tense, bodily experience raise similar issues in relation to photographic documentation.

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In the moment where digital overtakes analog photography, photographs and film have become historical objects themselves. In the film installations of the last chapter of this book, a new understanding of photographic media seems to have emerged in the last few decades because of the slow passing of analog media. In the work of artists, such as Tacita Dean, Matthew Buckingham, and Tony Cokes, it is the media themselves that become objects of interest. In the 1960s and 1970s, which is the focus of Chrissie Iles’s exhibition at the Whitney titled Into the Light: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art, the installation with slide projector or film projector did not inspire feelings of nostalgia or temporal dislocation. They represented instead tools for the display of art in spaces. It is in t he context of contemporary installation art, however, t hat t hese ob jects b ecome ha ndles f or nost algia, a nd t he a rtists mourn the passing of these media that were important to art in the twentieth century. By using the work of F. R. Ankersmit, I’ve argued that this of melancholy and nostalgia evoked by the ephemerality of these media can be used to gain a critical perspective on contemporary culture. It is eq ually notable that each of the artists discussed in t his chapter was also born in the late 1950s and 1960s and each has a different relationship to new media t han older generations. In the work of artists who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, the theme of history comes to the fore. Placed in the context o f a rt galler ies, in t he c lassic w hite c ube, film p rojectors a nd film become interesting sculptural objects. The film and the film projector are as sensuous as the beeswax or charcoal sticks in Ann Hamilton’s installations. In the work of Tacita Dean and Matthew Buckingham, the film becomes both a carrier of the content of memory and a mnemonic device itself. It is the material qualities of the photographic media that trigger associations and memories in addition to the pictures they display. Since the 1960s and 1970s, artists feel comfortable taking the risk of producing works of art that disappear. To take photography into account when considering installation art only enriches our understanding of the practice of installation art. This book adds a dimension to the study of installation art by considering its relationship to its supporting media. Photography of and as installation provides a lens through which to consider broader societal issues, suc h as ho w hist ory was wr itten a nd w hat memo ries a re co nsidered worth keeping.

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Because of the problem of “epic forgetting,” other members of the Frankfurt S chool ha ve r egarded memo ry as p otentially sub versive. I n his 1964 book, One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse, one of the philosophers of the counterculture, writes of the resistance in co nsumer societies to understanding history: “Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory.”9 Photographic media, which were thought to stop time and preserve faithfully moments of time in t he photographic surface, are now seen to be subject to time and its passage as well. These objects have become ruins. Every dramatic technological change, historical trauma, and social shift seems to be followed by a period o f reflection on history and memory — an effort to preserve and to understand these events. The last forty years have witnessed these kinds of changes in culture and art. As ephermerality intensifies at the end of the twentieth century with, for instance, the shift to digital technology, a keen interest in history and memory has emerged. It seems absolutely necessary t o avoid t he c ultural p roblem o f f orgetting, a nd in stallation a rt has provided a space in which to come to grips with these the transformations and to question them.

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notes Introduction 1. Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), xv–xix. 2. Joan Gibbons, Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 5. The art historian Joan Gibbons suggests that the interest in memory coincides with a shift from totalizing epistemologies of modernism to the more fragmented and subjective modalities of postmodernism. 3. Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 33. 4. Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site-Specificity,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 52. 5. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 159–60. 6. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 13. 7. Both Joan Gibbons and Lisa Saltzman cite this passage in Proust as well. 8. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 9. 9. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (1911; repr., New York: Henry Holt, 1926), 305–6. Bergson compares it directly to film. 10. Craig Ireland, The Subaltern Appeal to Experience: Self-Identity, Late Modernity, and the Politics of Immediacy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 63–66. 11. The essay was reprinted in Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 6. Greenberg writes, “This

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constraint, once the world of common extraverted experience has been renounced, can only be found in the very processes or disciplines by which art and literature have already imitated the former. These themselves become the subject matter of art and literature.” 12. Greenberg, Art and Culture, 157. 13. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 168. 14. Barbara Clausen et al., After the Act: The (Re)Presentation of Performance Art (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 2007), 117. 15. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon, France: Le Presses du Réel, 1998). 16. Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005). 17. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51–79. 18. Jones, Body Art, 35. Includes a direct quotation from Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 163. See also Douglas Davis, “Performance Photography,” Connoisseur (March 1985):144–45; Anne M. Wagner, “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” October 91 (Winter 2000): 59–80. 19. Jones, Body Art, 37. 20. Clausen et al., After the Act, 7. 21. Clausen et al., After the Act, 19. 22. Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 59–107. 23. For instance, Philip Auslander in Clausen et al., After the Act, 25, and Babette Mangolte in Clausen et al., After the Act, 38. 24. For a more comprehensive account of the varieties of memory practice in contemporary art, see Gibbons, Contemporary Art and Memory. 25. Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition, ed. Scott Bryson et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 40–87. 26. Owens, Beyond Recognition, 56–58. 27. James Meyer, “The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site-Specificity,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 25. 28. Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation (London: Routledge, 2000), 1–2. 29. Kwon, “One Place after Another,” 43.

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30. Kevin Melchionne, “Rethinking Site-Specificity: Some Critical and Philosophical Problems,” Art Criticism 12, no. 2 (1997): 40. Melchionne published an article that elaborated on the various types or degrees of site-specificity. One was “historical/political” and referred to works that recover history or political aspects of a site. 31. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Utopia,” in Utopia/Post-Utopia (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1988), 14. 32. Jameson is not the only one who describes time in the late twentieth century this way. Baudrillard and Michel Foucault also describe time in these terms. Baudrillard and Foucault see the 1960s as a time of endings in which time has become materialized or spatialized. 33. Jameson, “Postmodernism and Utopia,” 156. 34. Jameson, “Postmodernism and Utopia,” 14. 35. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (1981; repr., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 8. 36. Grant Kester, “The Rise and Fall of Baudrillard,” New Art Examiner 15, no. 3 (November 1987): 20. 37. Kate Linker, “From Imitation, to the Copy, to Just Effect: On Reading Jean Baudrillard,” Artforum 22, no. 8 (April 1984): 47. 38. Thomas Lawson, “Forum: Generation In Vitro,” Artforum 23, no. 1 (September 1984): 99; John Howell and Lisa Liebmann, “Forum: Retro/Trends,” Artforum 22, no. 3 (November 1983): 73. 39. Lawson, “Forum,” 99. 40. Linker, “From Imitation,” 47–48. 41. Kester, “The Rise and Fall,” 20–23. 42. Hal Foster, “The Art of Cynical Reason,” in The Return of the Real, 99–127 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). However, Grant Kester critiqued the art world’s fascination with Baudrillard by noting that the death of the real or the disappearance of history is only persuasive in a very few Western cities. Meanwhile, industry had moved on to developing nations where issues of production and collectivity are still very much alive and important. 43. Kester, “The Rise and Fall”; there are other cultural commentators who need to be mentioned in this regard. Andreas Huyssen, a literary and art critic, has written two books on memory culture, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia and, most recently, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. He links the interest in memory to questions and concerns about burgeoning archives and documentation but also to the interest in the Holocaust in Germany beginning in the 1970s. In addition, he cites the politicization of

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memory and its use in documenting genocides around the world in the twentieth century. In his Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis, Richard Terdiman, a literary critic with a new historicist bent, takes the thesis that a memory crisis in the nineteenth century produced specific approaches to literature and semiotics. Pierre Nora, a French historian, whose article “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” appeared in the 1989 issue of Representations, is often cited by art critics in relation to the issue of memory. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24. Lastly, James Young wrote The Texture of Memory, a survey and critique of Holocaust monuments in contemporary Germany. 44. David Deitcher, William Olander, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, The Art of Memory: The Loss of History (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985), 50. 45. These ideas were taken up again in the collection of essays on photography The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, edited by Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), to which Solomon-Godeau was a contributor. Also in this volume, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s essay “From Factura to Factography” addresses the ambivalence of photography in critical practice. 46. Mary Jane Jacob, Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival (New York: Rizzoli Publications, 1991), 13–20. 47. Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 105. 48. Lynne Cooke, Brian Curiger, and Greg Hilty, Doubletake: Collective Memory and Current Art (New York: Parkett, 1992), 23. 49. Cooke, Curiger, and Hilty, Doubletake, 26. Another European exhibition that used the topic of memory was The Sublime Void: On the Memory of the Imagination at the Koninklijk Museum in Antwerp in 1993. It included work by Rachel Whiteread, Jannis Kounellis, Juan Muñoz, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Wall, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and others. 50. Quoted in Ted Gott, Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 57. 51. Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” October 51 (Winter 1989): 17–18. 52. Gott, Don’t Leave Me This Way, 34–51. 53. Gott, Don’t Leave Me This Way, 69–70. 54. Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

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55. Nicholas De Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, and Michael Petry, Installation Art in the New Millennium: The Empire of the Senses (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 9. 56. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 7. 57. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 160. 58. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 23. 59. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 3. Chapter 1: Expanding the Frame 1. See also Reiss, From Margin to Center, 109–31. 2. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), xii. 3. Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube, Part I: Notes on the Gallery Space,” Artforum 14, no. 7 (March 1976): 25. 4. O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube, Part I,” 25. 5. Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube, Part II: The Eye and the Spectator,” Artforum 14, no. 8 (April 1976): 27. 6. O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube, Part II,” 33–34. 7. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 59. 8. John C. Welchman, “In and Around the ‘Second Frame,’” in The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, ed. Paul Duro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 213. 9. Derrida, Truth in Painting, 61. 10. Linda Blumberg, program director of PS1, statement in Rooms, PS1, Institute for Art and Urban Resources catalog, designed and edited by Stephen Alexander and Eugenie Diserio (New York: The Institute, 1977), 133. 11. Martin Beck, “Alternative: Space,” in Alternative Art, New York, 1965–1985, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 257. 12. Nancy Foote, “Apotheosis of the Crummy Space,” Artforum International 15, no. 2 (October 1976): 28–37. 13. José Bélisle, David Rabinowitch (Montreal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2003), 10. 14. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44. In this article, Krauss mapped a field of sculptural practice based on

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the fixed cultural categories of architecture and landscape, from which she derived sculpture, site construction, marked sites, and axiomatic structures. In these new categories, Krauss could fit site-specific earthworks, outdoor sculptural arrangements, and other sculptural practices, plotting their positions relative to the category of sculpture. The idea of a field of relationships is based on this idea. 15. Quoted in Stephen Alexander and Eugenie Diserio, eds. and designers, “Richard Tuttle on Richard Serra,” in Rooms, PS1, Institute for Art and Urban Resources catalog (New York: The Institute, 1977), 69. 16. Quoted in Alexander and Diserio, Rooms, 123, 126. 17. Quoted in Alexander and Diserio, Rooms, 124. 18. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 76–77. She cites Henri Bergson, who indicates that consciousness occurs as a result of perception, and, therefore, the mind is aware of only a moment that has passed and never experiences the present moment as it happens. There is always a lag between perceptual stimulus and the mind’s conscious awareness. 19. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 102. 20. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 10. 21. Krauss, “Notes on the Index,” 69. 22. Krauss, “Notes on the Index, Part 2,” 70. 23. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 95. 24. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 219. 25. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 304. 26. Krauss, “Notes on the Index, Part 2,” 65. 27. Krauss, “Notes on the Index, Part 2,” 69. 28. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 10–11. 29. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 63. 30. Quoted in Alexander and Diserio, Rooms, 122. 31. Foote, “Apotheosis,” 37. 32. See the useful summary of the uses of photography in Matta-Clark’s work in Christian Kravagna’s chapter “It’s Nothing Worth Documenting If It’s Not Difficult to Get: On the Documentary Nature of Photography and Film in the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark,” in Gordon Matta-Clark, ed. Corinne Diserens (London: Phaidon, 2003). 33. Pamela M. Lee, Gordon Matta-Clark: Object to Be Destroyed (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 36–38. 34. Moure, Gordon Matta-Clark, 252. 35. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thoug ht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 85, 160–64.

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36. David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003), 559. 37. See, for instance, Amelia Jones, Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (London: Routledge, 2006), 4–5. Amelia Jones connects this notion of knowledge directly to photography. 38. Summers, Real Spaces, 603. 39. Summers, Real Spaces, 603. 40. Summers, Real Spaces, 458–66. 41. Moure, Gordon Matta-Clark, 21. 42. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 305. 43. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 306. 44. Mary Jane Jacob, Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985), 20–23. 45. Mary Warner Marien, Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History, 1839–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3–5. 46. Marien, Photography, 3. 47. Tina Kukielski, “In the Spirit of the Vegetable: The Early Works of Gordon Matta-Clark (1969–71),” in Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure, ed. Elisabeth Sussman (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art), 36–37. 48. Kukielski, “In the Spirit,” 43. 49. Jeffrey Meikle, American Plastics: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), Kindle edition, chap. 1. 50. Lee, Gordon Matta-Clark, 67–68. 51. Anne M. Wagner, “Splitting and Doubling: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Body of Sculpture,” Grey Room 14 (Winter 2004): 35. 52. For more, see Lee, “Holes of History,” in Object to Be Destroyed. 53. Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” in Beyond Recognition, ed. Scott Bryson et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 41; and James Meyer, “Nostalgia and Memory: Legacies of the 1960s in Recent Work,” in Painting, Object, Film, Concept: Selections from the Herbig Collection (New York: Christie’s, 1998), 26–27. 54. Moure, Gordon Matta-Clark, 61. 55. Karl Marx, Early Writings, ed. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 124–25. 56. Moure, Gordon Matta-Clark, 142. 57. Moure, Gordon Matta-Clark, 253. 58. Al Brunelle, “The Great Divide: Anarchitecture by Gordon Matta-Clark,” Art in America 62, no. 5 (September–October 1974): 92. 59. Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting (New York: Loft Books, 1974).

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60. Wagner, “Splitting and Doubling,” 35. For more comments on Matta-Clark’s photo-collages, see Simon Morrissey, “Gordon Matta-Clark,” Creative Camera 337 (December 1995/January 1996): 40; Lisa Le Feuvre, “The W-hole Story,” Art Monthly 255 (April 2002): 12–15; Judith Russi Kirshner, “Non-uments,” Artforum 24, no. 2 (October 1985): 102–8. 61. Moure, Gordon Matta-Clark, 252. 62. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1966, 1988), 70. 63. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 32. 64. Julie Ault, “Chronology,” in Alternative Art, New York, 1965–1985, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 35. 65. Claudia Gould and Valerie Smith, eds., 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space (New York: Artists Space, 1998), 58. 66. Janelle Reiring, press release from Artists Space, summer 1978. 67. Janelle Reiring, interview with author, June 24, 2009. 68. Adrian Piper, Adrian Piper: A Retrospective (Baltimore: University of Maryland, 1999). 69. Louise Lawler, Louise Lawler and Others (Basel, Switzerland: Kunstmuseum Basel, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004), 20–21. 70. In addition to this work, Lawler designed a logo for the exhibition that appeared in the catalog and throughout Lower Manhattan, extending her work outside the traditional exhibition space. 71. Gould and Smith, 5000 Artists, 101. 72. Louise Lawler, questionnaire prepared by author, June 30, 2009. 73. Quoted in Gould and Smith, 5000 Artists, 97. 74. Janelle Reiring, ___________, Louise Lawler, Adrian Piper and Cindy Sherman Have Agreed to Participate in an Exhibition Organized by Janelle Reiring at Artists Space, September 23 to October 28, 1978 (New York: Committee for the Visual Arts, 1978), 13–14. 75. Gwyn Prins, “The Battle for Control of the Camera in Late NineteenthCentury Western Zambia,” in Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 221. 76. These works include Allan Sekula’s “The Body and the Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton, 344–89 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” Artforum 13, no. 2 (January 1975): 36–45; Martha Rosler’s “In, Around and Afterthoughts: Notes on Documentary Photography,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

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1989), 303–41; and Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). 77. Lawler, questionnaire. 78. Reiring, interview. 79. April Kingsley, “Art Goes Underground,” Village Voice, October 18, 1978, 122. 80. Lawler also says that these images were never printed. Lawler, questionnaire. 81. Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 75–88. 82. Derrida, Truth in Painting, 59. 83. Derrida, Truth in Painting, 61. 84. Derrida, Truth in Painting, 61. Chapter 2: The Politics of Representation 1. Renée Green, Alexander Alberro, Nora M. Alter, and Nuria Enguita Mayo, Shadows and Signals (Barcelona: Fundácio Antoni Tapies, 2000), 46–47. Most of the descriptions of these pieces were derived from Alex Alberro’s descriptions in this catalog. 2. Part of the material in this chapter was published previously in “The Family Slide Show as Critical History in Renée Greene’s Video Partially Buried Continued,” Thi rd Text 21, no. 4 (July 2007): 441–50. 3. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 184. 4. Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the PostMedium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 26–29. Krauss labels this relationship the phenomenological vector of the work. 5. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Warburg’s Paragon? The End of Collage and Photomontage in Postwar Europe,” in Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, ed. Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen (Munich: Prestel, 1998), 54. 6. Buchloh, “Warburg’s Paragon?” 59. 7. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 3–6. Foster includes Green among the group, although he does not elaborate on her work. 8. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 214–15. 9. Elizabeth A. Brown, “Social Studies: 4 + 4 Young Americans,” Allen Memorial Art Gallery Bulletin 44, no. 1 (1990): 51. 10. See James Meyer, “Artist as Nomad,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 27.

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11. Sekula, “On the Invention,” 36. 12. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 6–7. 13. Alex Alberro notes that Green practices a form of Foucaultian genealogy in her work. Green et al., Shadows and Signals, 25. 14. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 12–14. 15. Hollis Frampton, Circles of Confusion: Film Photography and Video Texts, 1968–1980 (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983), 75. 16. Quoted in Marien, Photography, 77–78. 17. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 82. 18. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 39. 19. Elizabeth Edwards, “Photographs as Objects of Memory,” in Material Memories, ed. Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley (Oxford, UK: Berg, 1999), 221. 20. Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre, “Daguerreotype,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 12. 21. Prins, “The Battle for Control,” 221. 22. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Objects of Ethnography,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Laine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 388. 23. Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” October 34 (Fall 1985): 84. Allan Sekula also discusses the fetishism of photographs. See Sekula, “On the Invention,” 38. 24. For more on this subject, see Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 25. See Edward Steichen, “A Special Portfolio of Photographs by Ezra Stoller of the Family of Man Exhibition on the Walls of the Museum of Modern Art, New York,” in The Family of Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 195–207. 26. Steichen, “A Special Portfolio,” 4. 27. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 24. 28. Svetlana Alpers, “Museums as a Way of Seeing,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Laine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 26. 29. Jennifer A. González, “Siting Histories: Material Display and the Politics of Display in the Work of Fred Wilson, Pepón Osorio, and Amalia Mesa-Bains, 1985–1995,” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1996.

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30. Mary Ann Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 18–22. 31. Conceptual artists in the 1960s took up nonaesthetic, document-like form in their photo work in a critique of institutions that upheld formalist aesthetic photography conventions. Jeff Wall has argued that such practices were a critique of the modernist photographic aesthetics that overvalued technical skill, uniqueness, and serious subject matter. Jeff Wall, “Marks of Indifference: Aspects of Photography in or as Conceptual Art,” in Reconsidering the Object of Art, 1965–75, ed. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 258–65. 32. Sekula, “On the Invention,” 36. 33. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 22. 34. Renée Green, questionnaire prepared by author, November 2008. 35. Jennifer A. González, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 245–49. 36. Fred Wilson, The Museum: Mixed Metaphors (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1993), 29–32. 37. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part III: Notes and Nonsequitors,” in Art in Theory: 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992), 819. 38. Susan Krane and Bruce Jenkins, Hollis Frampton: Recollections and Recreations (Buffalo, NY: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1984), 10. 39. Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton: Nostalgia (London: Afterall Books, 2006). 40. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 23. 41. Green et al., Shadows and Signals, 51. Please see, in particular, Nora Alter’s chapter “Beyond the Frame: Renee Green’s Video Practice.” 42. Yvonne Rainer, Journeys from Berlin, DVD (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 1980). 43. This is excluded in Rainer’s version. Walter Benjamin, Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 182. 44. Green et al., Shadows and Signals, 145. 45. Renée Green, World Tour (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993), E57. 46. Manovich, Language of New Media, 240. 47. Renée Green, “Partially Buried in Three Parts: Extract,” in Ruins in Reverse: Time and Progress in Contemporary Art, ed. Grant Kester, CEPA Journal (Buffalo, NY: Center for the Exploratory and Perpetual Arts [CEPA], September 1998– March 1999), 34.

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48. Renée Green, Between and Including (Vienna: Secession, 2001), 61. 49. Darsie Alexander et al., Slide Show: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), ix. 50. Frampton, Circles of Confusion, 111. 51. Renée Green, questionnaire prepared by author, May 2006. 52. Douglas Collins, The Story of Kodak (New York: Abrams, 1990), 263. 53. Eastman Kodak Company, Adventures in Outdoor Color Slides (Rochester, NY: Kodak Sales Division, 1962), 44. 54. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 24. 55. Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free Press, 1979), 14. 56. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 42–43. 57. Nancy Martha West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 5. 58. The piece is “Mirror Displacement on a Compost Heap,” 1969, Düsseldorf, Germany. Guglielmo Bargellesi-Severi, ed., Robert Smithson: Slideworks (Milan, Italy: Carlo Frua, 1997), 125. 59. Owens, “Earthwords,” 40–41. 60. Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 119. 61. Robert Smithson, “Hotel Palenque, 1969–72,” Parkett 43 (March 1995): 117–32. 62. Kwon, One Place after Another, 51. 63. See also González, Subject to Display, 241–49. 64. Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 316–18. Chapter 3: The Poetics of Experience 1. Ann Hamilton, e-mail message to author, August 21, 2001. 2. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 47–63. 3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 92. 4. Ann Hamilton, Tomoaki Kitagawa, Bernhart Schwenk, and Takao Ueda, the picture is still (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2003). 5. Hamilton, e-mail message.

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6. Ann Hamilton, personal communication, 2011. 7. Joan Simon, Ann Hamilton (New York: Abrams, 2002), 256. 8. Simon, Ann Hamilton, 11. 9. Ireland, Subaltern Appeal, 63–66. 10. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1934), 246. 11. Hans-Robert Jauss, Question and Answer: Forms of Dialogic Understanding, as quoted in Ireland, Subaltern Appeal, 44. 12. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Them e (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 7. See footnote 33. 13. Ireland, Subaltern Appeal, 199–200. 14. Ireland, Subaltern Appeal, 44. 15. Jay, Downcast Eyes, 24–31, 69–82. 16. Robert Morris, “The Present Tense of Space,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 182. 17. Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (Autumn 1990): 9–11. 18. Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 7. 19. Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 9. 20. Krauss, “Cultural Logic,” 7. 21. Krauss, “Cultural Logic,” 15–16. 22. Kate Mondloch, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 56–59. Mondloch refers to Krauss’s assessment of the “late-capitalist museum” as a place to experience “experience.” 23. Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer, Whitney Biennial 2004 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2004), 243. 24. Mary Jane Jacob and Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 1988), 54. 25. Jacob and Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 71. 26. Hugh M. Davies and Lynda Forsha, “A Conversation with Ann Hamilton,” in Ann Hamilton (San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1991), 70. 27. Ann Hamilton, personal communication, 2011. 28. Ann Hamilton, unpublished lecture notes, 2001. 29. Anna Chave, “Sculpture, Gender, and the Value of Labor,” American Art 24, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 26–29. 30. Davies and Forsha, “A Conversation with Ann Hamilton,” 70. 31. Jay, Songs of Experience, 331.

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32. E. P. Tho mpson, The Essential E. P. Thom pson, ed. Dorothy Tho mpson (New York: New Press, 2001), 62. 33. Tho mpson, Essential E. P. Thom pson, 61. 34. Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), xi. 35. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 98. 36. Bruce Kaiper, “The Human Object and Its Capitalist Image,” Left Curve, no. 5 (Fall–Winter 1975): 43. 37. Frank B. Gilbreth, Motion Study: A Method for Increasing the Efficiency of the Workman (1911; repr., Easton, PA: Hive Publishing, 1972), 6–7. 38. Gilbreth, Motion Study, 62–63. 39. Quoted in Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 15. 40. Reesa Goldberg, “The Exhibited Redistributed: A Case for Reassessing Space,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Goldberg (London: Routledge, 1996), 350–53; also cited in Richard J. Williams, After Modern Sculpture: Art in the United States and Europe, 1965–70 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 101–2. 41. Ann Hamilton, notes to author, 2011. 42. Thibault Jeanson, interview with author, December 2006. 43. Ann Hamilton, interview with author, November 2006. 44. Mary Katherine Coffey, “Histories That Haunt: A Conversation with Ann Hamilton,” Art Journal 60, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 22–23. Hamilton gave me a revised version of this quotation, which is what appears in this text. Ann Hamilton, personal communication, 2011. 45. Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama (New York: Abrams, 2000), 1–18. 46. Wolf Prix, “The Imaging of Reality,” Architecture California (May 1992): 14. 47. Craig Hodgetts, “Heretical Thoughts on Architecture and Photography,” Architecture California (May 1992): 61. 48. Robert Hopkins, Picture, Image, and Experience: A Philosophical Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17. 49. Hamilton et al., the picture is still. 50. Quoted in Kelley, Childsplay, 130–31. 51. Buskirk, Contingent Object, 212–58. 52. Ann Hamilton, interview with author, November 2006. 53. Morris, “The Present Tense,” 182. 54. Morris, “The Present Tense.” Morris is using the work of Herbert Mead as a reference.

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55. Judith Rodenbeck, “Foil: Allan Kaprow before Photography,” in Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts, Events, Objects, Documents, by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh et al. (New York: Columbia University, 1999), 58. 56. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 10. 57. Le désir de photographier est le contraire du désir de signifier à tout prix; de témoigner ou d’informer. Il est de l’ordre de la sidération et de l’illusion. De l’ordre de la disparition aussi, car si quelque chose veut devenir image, ce n’est pas pour durer, c’est pour mieux disparaître. 58. Tendance Floue and Jean Baudrillard, Sommes-Nous? (Paris: Naïve, 2006). 59. Ann Hamilton, notes to the author. 60. Amelia Jones, Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (London: Routledge, 2006), 6. 61. Jones, Self/Image, 56. 62. Jones, Self/Image. Jones borrows this term from Laura U. Marks. 63. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 8. 64. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 51. 65. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 14. 66. Helène Cixous, “Coming to Writing,” in “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson, trans. Sarah Cornell et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 4. 67. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 102. 68. Ann Hamilton has a photographic archive of her works in her studio, and her works up to 2000 have been described in detail and cataloged in the catalogue raisonné by Joan Simon. Chapter 4: Camera Obscura 1. Quoted in Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 4. 2. Sherry Turkle, ed., Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 5. 3. James Quandt gives them a European genealogy by describing them as “Moholy-Nagy” compositions. James Quandt, “Tacita Dean, Schaulager Basel,” Artforum 3 (November 2006): 287. 4. Jean-Christophe Royoux uses the term in his work about Dean’s work in Jean-Christophe Royoux, Marina Warner, and Germaine Greer, Tacita Dean (London: Phaidon, 2006), 50–101. 5. Royoux, Warner, and Greer, Tacita Dean, 8. 6. Tacita Dean, Floh (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl Publications, 2001). 7. Royoux, Warner, and Greer, Tacita Dean, 98.

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8. Royoux, Warner, and Greer, Tacita Dean, 64. 9. Royoux, Warner, and Greer, Tacita Dean, 17. 10. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 98. 11. Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” 4. 12. Jennifer Uhrhane, “Timeline,” Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, accessed June 14, 2011, www.godowskycolorawards.org/2009/timeline .html. 13. Quandt, “Tacita Dean,” 287–88. 14. Mondloch, Screens, 2. 15. Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 6–7. 16. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 108. 17. Saltzman, Making Memory Matter. Lisa Saltzman also refers to this artwork in her book. 18. Margaret Morse, “Video Installation Art: The Body, the Image, and the Space In-Between,” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New York: Aperture, 1990), 154. 19. Image of Absalon to Be Projected until It Vanishes, 2001, accessed May 11, 2011, www.matthewbuckingham.net/Image%20Absalon.html. 20. Mark Godfrey, “Artist as Historian,” October 120 (Spring 2007): 140–72. This essay is a useful source for information on Buckingham’s work. 21. Raymond Fielding, ed., A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 119, 130. 22. Fielding, A Technological History, 132–33. 23. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 22. 24. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (1968; repr., London: Verso, 1996), 135–40. 25. Benjamin, Illuminations, 159–60. 26. Kern, Culture of Time, 39. 27. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 63. 28. Godfrey, “Artist as Historian,” 159–62. 29. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence: 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 321. 30. Royoux, Warner, and Greer, Tacita Dean, 17. 31. Quandt, “Tacita Dean,” 287.

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32. Debra Singer, “The Way Things Never Were: Nostalgia’s Possibilities and the Unpredictable Past,” in Whitney Biennial 2004, by Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Monim, and Debra Singer, 22–33 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2004). 33. Malcolm Turvey et al., “Roundtable: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art,” October 104 (Spring 2003): 75. 34. F. R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 121. 35. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 22–25. 36. Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006), 244. 37. Davis, Yearning for Yesterday, 31. 38. Tony Cokes, questionnaire prepared by author, September 2007. 39. Fred Barnum, “His Master’s Voice,” in America: Ninety Years of Communications Pioneering, and Progress: Victor Talking Machine Company (Camden, NJ: General Electric, 1991), 251, 318–19. 40. Patrick McGeehan, “Vinyl Records and Turntables Are Gaining Sales,” New York Times, December 6, 2009. 41. Elizabeth E. Guffey, Retro: The Culture of Revival (London: Tha mes and Hudson, 2006), 44. 42. Davis, Yearning for Yesterday, 90. 43. Jameson, Postmodernism, 290. 44. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 43. 45. Jameson, Postmodernism, 156. 46. Jameson, “Postmodernism and Utopia,” 14. 47. Jameson, “Postmodernism and Utopia,” 70. 48. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), xx. 49. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 30. 50. Philip Rosen, quoted in Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 221. Conclusion 1. James Atlee and Lisa Le Feuvre, Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between (London: Nazraeli Press, 2003), 7. 2. Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” in Beyond Recognition, ed. Scott Bryson et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 77.

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3. Owens, “Allegorical Impulse,” 56–58. 4. The Dia Art Foundation has an ongoing effort to document Spiral Jetty in order to preserve it. There are concerns about the work because of not only interventions by people who visit the site and take rocks but also encroaching development. Randy Kennedy, November 17, 2009. 5. Ellen Handy, “Installations and History,” Arts Magazine, February 1989, 62. 6. Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” ArtNews 57, no. 6 (1958): 56. 7. I use this term keeping Mary Ann Doane’s and Martha Buskirk’s work in mind. 8. Lisa G. Corrin, “Installing History,” Art Papers 18, no. 4 (July–August 1994): 6. 9. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 98.

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index Abstract Expressionism, 203 acetate film, 174, 176 Adorno, Theodor, 94, 135, 181–82, 188 African American history, 90 African Americans, 76, 92 agency, issue of, 123, 134, 154 AIDS, 16–17 Akira Ikeda Gallery, 117, 147, 148, 151–52, 153, 157 Alberro, Alex, 115 Albers, Anni, On Designing, 131–32 aleph (Hamilton), 140 Alexander, Darsie, 102, 107 Alignment Series: Disaster Story Line (Getting It Straight) (Baldessari), 38 allegory, 202 Alpers, Svetlana, 87 Alter, Nora, 96 amateur photography: conventions of, 110; home movies, 176–77, 181–82; slide shows, 101–9; snapshots, 100, 103–5, 109–11, 166, 179 ambiguity, Green and, 109–11 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 93

analog media, 20, 22, 73, 147, 163–65, 170–71, 183, 188–89, 194, 206; a nd memory, 197–98. See also types of media Andre, Carl, 28 Animal Locomotion: Walking Taking Off Hat (Muybridge), 6 Ankersmit, F. R., 187, 195, 197, 206 anthropological displays, 85–86, 90 anti-aestheticism, 75–76 Apple Shrine (Kaprow), 126 Arago, Dominique François, 83, 103 archaeology, 80–81, 90–91 architecture, 42–44, 49–51, 53, 108, 130, 143, 153, 165, 172; embodied, 133–34; photography of, 145–46. See also Matta-Clark, Gordon; sitespecific art Architecture California, 146 archival art, 89–93 archival artists, 167 archival impulse, 3, 36, 131 archival memory, 182; contrasted with bodily memory, 177–78 archival structure, 78, 97, 101, 114–15

240

INDEX

Archive of Contemporary History (Bott), 91 archives: catalogs as, 38–40; journeys through, 96–100; and work of Renée Green, 77–80 archiving practice, 3 Arranged by Louise Lawler, 92 art. See archival art; body art; installation art; performance art; site-specific art Art: 21, Art in the Twenty-First Century (television show), 2 Artforum, 14 artifacts, 167, 181, 190–91, 199, 205; African, 90; collection of, 84; Green’s use of, 73, 77, 81, 83; juxtaposition of, in installation art, 79–80; photographs as, 84 art institution: as de facto frame, 26; franchising of, 127. See also names of museums and galleries artist’s book, 50–57, 166–67 Artists Space (New York), 24, 57–71, 92, 204 Art of Memory, The: The Loss of History (exhibition), 14 art practices: ephemeral, 3, 9–10, 23; feminist, 123 arts and crafts movement, 135–37 Arts of the Environment, 11 artwork, relationship with exhibition space and viewer, 29–35 Asher, Michael, 65, 130 Atget, Eugene, 114 at hand (Hamilton), 121 Atkins, Robert, 17 Attali, Jacques, 190; Noise: The Political Economy of Music, 190

“attendants,” Hamilton’s use of, 139–41 aura: and experience, 4–7; power of, 163; of space, photograph and, 146 avant-garde, principles of (collage, montage, and shock), 75 Aycock, Alice, 130 Baldessari, John, 39, 73, 91; Alignment Series: Disaster Story Line (Getting It Straight), 38 Baltimore Museum of Art, 189 Barber, Bruce, Remembering Vietnam, 15 Barry, Judith, 14 Barry, Robert, 107 Barthes, Roland, 63, 67, 73, 86, 94, 118, 147, 156; Camera Lucida, 82, 160–61 Bartlett, Jennifer, 39 Baudrillard, Jean, 13, 156, 177, 211n32; Simulacra and Simulation, 12 Becher, Bernd and Hilla, 75–76, 114, 165 Beck, Martin, 28 Benjamin, Walter, 4, 87, 176, 181, 197; on allegory, 202; on aura, 7; influence, 10–11, 66–67, 97; on mémoire volontaire, 5; on modernity, 135; “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 4; on photography, 20, 38, 66–67, 84, 177– 78, 189, 198–99; “Storyteller,” 4; “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” 98; on wish image, 167, 185; “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 4 Bergson, Henri, 5, 45–46, 54, 56, 139, 199, 214n18; Creative Evolution, 45 Between and Including (exhibition), 96

INDEX

Beuys, Joseph, 128, 131 Bishop, Claire, 8–9, 123, 130; Installation Art: A Critical History, 117, 126, 128 Black Panthers, 93–94 Black Race Horse (Stull), 58 Blade Runner (film), 16 Blau, Douglas, 92–93 Bleckner, Ross, 13 Blue (sky over Los Alamos, New Mexico, 5/5/00, morning effect) (Finch), 129–30 bodily experience, 137; Bergson on, 45; in Hamilton’s work, 119, 132, 205; in Matta-Clark’s work, 48, 70; and nostalgia, 187, 192; in performance art and body art, 8; and photography, 27, 156–63; and time, 172, 199; of viewer, 7, 19–20, 22, 34, 36, 41, 118, 128, 149; of work and photographs of work, 117–19 bodily intimacy, 134 bodily memory, 4, 10, 12, 21, 134, 165, 167, 177–79, 187–89, 198 bodily perception, 125 body art, 3, 9 body knowledge, 134–36 body object series (Hamilton), 120 Boltanski, Christian, 15, 130–31; Chases High School, 131; Les Habits de François C, 131 Boris, Eileen, 136 Bosley B2 camera, 103 Bott, Karsten: Archive of Contemporary History, 91; One of Each, 91 Bound Square (Winsor), 134 Bourdieu, Pierre, 104 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 8–9

Boym, Svetlana, 104 Bradley, Slater, Doppelganger Trilogy, 188–89 Brauntuch, Troy, 14 bricklayers, Gilbreth’s study of, 138–39 Brockton, Massachusetts, 90–91 Broken Record Blues (Oppenheim), 30, 70 Broodthaers, Marcel, 73, 75–76, 90, 107, 114 Brunelle, Al, 50 Bruno, Giuliana, 97 Buchloh, Benjamin, 75–76 Buckingham, Matthew, 88, 165, 186, 199, 204, 206; Image of Absalon to Be Projected until It Vanishes, 173–74; Situation Leading to a Story, 171, 173–76, 175, 178–86, 180, 184; Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the Year 502,002 C.E., 93 Buck-Morss, Susan, 167 Bunn, David, 91 Burden, Chris, 15 Buren, Daniel, 29 Buskirk, Martha, 26, 143; The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art, 10 Bykert Gallery, New York, 47 cabinet of curiosity, 91 Cadava, Eduardo, 97, 198–99 California, 112–13 camera obscura, 172–73 capitalism, 60, 104, 123–25, 136 caption, of photograph, 38 car culture, 113 catalog: for Artists Space show, 65–67; as narrative and archive, 38–40, 69–70;

241

242

INDEX

for the picture is still, 147–54; of Rooms exhibition, 38–40, 69–70; as supplement to installation art, 119, 142–43 catalog photography, conventions of, 153 Center for Land Use Interpretation, Los Angeles, 91 Cerro de Pasco Company, 180–81 Charlesworth, Sarah, 15 Charlottesville, Virginia, 145, 157 Chases High School (Boltanski), 131 Chave, Anna, 134 cherry tree, Matta-Clark and, 48 Chicago, Judy, 123; Dinner Party, 137 Cibachromes, 41, 80, 86–87 CinéKodak Model A camera, 176 civil rights movement, 123 Cixous, Hélène, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, 134, 161–62 Clark, Lygia, 128 Clausen, Barbara, 10 Cleveland, Ohio, 98 Code: Survey (Green), 111–14, 112–13 Cokes, Tony, 165, 206; Headphones, 171, 190–94, 191, 196–200 Colette, David’s Wraith, 30 collaboration, interpretation as, 143–46 collage, 53, 55, 91, 106, 111; in film, 97–98 collecting practice, 3, 84 color, and photographic film, 103–4 color slide, 103–4 Columbia Music, 193 Columbus, Ohio, 118 conceptual art movement, 73, 114 Conical Intersect (Matta-Clark), 48

consciousness, as result of perception, 214n18 consumer culture, 75–76 contingency, 36, 38, 125, 143, 203; and photography, 38, 44, 153–54 contingent, the, 36, 136 continuity, in Matta-Clark’s Splitting, 54 Cooke, Lynne, 16 Copjec, Jane, 160 Cornell University, 42 corpus (Hamilton), 121 craftsman ideal, 134–41 craft tradition, 134–41 Crary, Jonathan, 18 Crimp, Douglas, 66; “Mourning and Militancy,” 16–17 Dada, 75 Daguerre, Louis-Jacques Mandé, 46–47, 83–84 daguerreotype sitters, 157–58 D’Arcangelo, Christopher, 24, 58–62, 65, 69–70, 204; untitled work, 61 database structure, in installation art, 77, 111–12 David, Jacques-Louis, Death of Marat, 30 David’s Wrai∕ th (Colette), 30 Davis, Angela, 78, 93–94 Davis, Fred, 104, 195 Day without Art (Visual AIDS), 17 Dean, Basil, 166 Dean, Tacita, 76–77, 167–69, 183, 199, 204, 206; Floh, 166–67; Green Ray, 166; Kodak, 165–71, 169–70, 185; Searching for Spiral Jetty, 167; Teignmouth Electron, 166 de Antonio, Emile, 79

INDEX

de-architecturalization, 108 Death of Marat (David), 30 deictic index, 37 Deitcher, David, 14 Deleuze, Gilles, 56 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 11, 26, 37, 67, 203; Truth in Painting, 68 Dewey, John, 125, 162; Art as Experience, 122 Dia Art Foundation, 130, 143, 226n4 Dick, Philip K., 16 digital: archives, 111; clocks, 13; databases, 76–77, 111; file names, 193; files, 194; imagery, 183; media and technology, 21, 102, 145, 164–65, 170, 183, 189–90, 196–98, 206–7; present, 183; reproduction, 192 Dinner Party (Chicago), 137 Dion, Mark, 88, 90–91; New England Digs, 90–91 distancing, 2, 118 Doane, Mary Ann, 5–6, 35–36, 38, 97, 125, 131, 136, 162, 176, 179, 199, 203 document: changing notion of, 88; and monument, 80–81; in Partially Buried Continued, 100–102; photograph as, 108–9, 147, 160 documentation, in work of Matta-Clark, 41–42 Documentations (exhibition), 46 Donovan, Tara, 129; Transplanted, 129 Doors, Floors, Doors (Matta-Clark), 33, 34 Doppelganger Trilogy (Bradley), 188–89 Dorner, Alexander, 87 Doubletake (exhibition), 16 Duchamp, Marcel, 36, 65

Durant, Sam, 76–77 duration, 56 durée, 54 Ealing Film Studios, 166 Earth Art (exhibition), 42 Eastman, George, 176 Egypt, French expedition of 1809, 83 Eiki Slim Line Projector, 182–83 endings, in work of Dean, 167–68 entropy, and site-specific art, 49 ephemerality: and art practices, 3, 9–10, 23; of film, 97; and installation art, 2–3, 23, 121, 202; and memory, 165, 178; and modernity, 36, 202; and nostalgia, 194; and site-specific art, 42, 202 “epic forgetting,” 207 ergon, 26, 67, 69 ethnographic displays, 85–86, 90 Evans, Walker, 165 exhibition catalog. See catalog exhibition space, relationship with artwork and viewer, 29–35 experience: art as, 7, 123–27; and art discourse, 121–23; and aura, 4–7; of craft, 136–41; exceeding frame, 27; in Hamilton’s work, 131–42; historical, 197; and image, 162–63; and installation art, 1–2, 7–9, 36, 117–19, 127–31; and memory, 155; in modernity, 178; of nostalgia, 192; in photography, 153–54, 179; of time, 172, 176. See also bodily experience; sensory experience experimental video, as postmodernist art form, 195

243

244

INDEX

face to face (Hamilton), 156–62, 159 Faller, Marion, No. 782 Apple Advancing, 95 Family of Man (exhibition), 85–86 feminism, 123, 134 Ferrer, Rafael, 65 fetish: photograph as, 84, 87; wish image as, 167 film: as archive of images, 96–97, 99; avant-garde, 97; as database, 99; ephemerality of, 97; as “evocative object,” 182–87. See also names of artists and titles of works film, photographic, 170–71; and color, 103–4. See also types of film film and video installations, 171–73. See also names of artists and titles of works film fragments, artist’s use of, 174–76 filmmaker, role of, in films, 99–100 film projector, as “evocative object,” 182–83, 186–87 film stills, 64 Finch, Spencer, 129; Blue (sky over Los Alamos, New Mexico, 5/5/00, morning effect), 129–30 Fischli, Peter, 189 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space (catalog), 59–62 Flavin, Dan, 127 Floh (Dean), 166–67 Foote, Nancy, 28–29, 32, 39–40, 69 Foster, Hal, 3, 14, 73–74, 76–77, 109, 166–67 Foucault, Michel, 18–19, 88, 188, 199, 211n32; Archaeology of Knowledge, 80–81 frame and framing, 90–91, 93; artists and, 203; as boundary and signifier,

52; “breaking” of, 24–25, 41–48; exhibition catalogs and, 24; of exhibition space, 65; functions of, 25, 42–43; in installation art, 41–48, 67–71, 136, 139, 203; of interactions between artwork, exhibition space, and viewer, 29–35; in media installation, 198–200; as metaphor for formalism, 43; and modernism, 24–25; in photography, 41–48, 70, 108, 112, 144, 179, 204; and production of meaning, 86; and site-specific art, 48–50; of visual interest, 87 Frampton, Hollis, 82, 89, 95–97, 102, 114; Magellan, 96; No. 782 Apple Advancing, 95; Nostalgia, 96; Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion, 95, 95; Visitation of Insomnia, 95 franchising, of art institutions, 127 Frankfurt School, 207 Fried, Michael, 7, 124; “Art and Objecthood,” 124 From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (Weems), 92 Fury, Gran, 17 gallery: as articulated space, 39–40; and film/video installations, 199–200; as frame, 24–25; and installation art, 26. See also names of galleries; white cube Garrels, Gary, 17 genealogy, 107–10; and memory, 18–19 gesture, in craft production, 137–39 ghost: a border act (Hamilton), 1–2, 144–45, 157 Gibbons, Joan, 209n2; Contemporary Art and Memory, 17

INDEX

Gibson, William, 16 Gilbreth, Frank B., 5, 138–41, 153; Lillian B. Gilbreth in Motion Study, 141 Gillette, Frank, 29 Glenn, John, 195 Global Taste (Rosler), 15 Goldberg, Reesa, 142 González, Jennifer, 90, 204; ideology of seeing, 87 Grace, Trudie, 57 Graham, Dan, 107; Homes for America, 189 Graham, Rodney, Torqued Chandelier Release, 189 Grand Canyon, 193–94, 196 Green, Mr., 103, 105–6, 108–9 Green, Renée, 72–115, 117, 164, 166–68, 202, 204–5; Code: Survey, 111–14, 112–13; Import/Export Funk Office, 99, 111–12; Korea Slides, 100, 106; Partially Buried, 72, 98, 110, 185; Partially Buried Continued, 75, 89, 98, 100–111, 186; Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts, 3, 72–73, 75–76, 78–80, 79, 81, 85, 88–89, 93–94, 101, 114, 184–85; and serial structure, 93–94, 101, 111; Some Chance Operations, 96–100; and use of sound, 184–85 Greenberg, Clement, 7, 123–24 Green Light Corridor (Nauman), 130 Green Ray (Dean), 166 Guffey, Elizabeth E., 192, 194–95 Guggenheim Museum, 127, 171, 188–89 Haacke, Hans, 65; Shapolsky et al, 91 Haber, Ira Joel, 35 Habits de François C, Les (Boltanski), 131

Hae Sun Kim, 106, 110 Halley, Peter, 13 Hamilton, Ann, 15, 116–63, 204–6; aleph, 140; at hand, 121; body object series, 120; corpus, 121; face to face, 156–62, 159; ghost: a border act, 1–2, 144–45, 157; mantle, 132, 133, 143; myein, 121, 139; and photographic documentation, 142–47; photographs, 156–62; the picture is still, 116–21, 134, 137, 143–45, 147–54, 148, 151, 151–52, 154, 156–57; room in pursuit of a position, 120; suitably positioned, 120; tropos, 140, 143 Hammons, David, 15 Handy, Ellen, 202 Hanover Landesmuseum, 87 Happening, 155–56 Harris, Suzanne, 28, 36, 125; Peace for the Temporal Highway, 34–35 Hayward Gallery, London, 16 Headphones (Cokes), 171, 190–94, 191, 196–200 Heiss, Alanna, 23, 25, 28, 40 heterotopia, installation art as, 18–20, 101, 188, 199–200 Highstene, Jene, 29, 39 Hiroshima, 118 Hirschhorn, Tho mas, 76 historical images, in Hamilton’s work, 131–42 history: African American, 90; in art world of 1980s and 1990s, 12–17; gleaned from material fragments, 174–76; as memory (Foucault), 80–81; Native American, 93; of objects, 4; in Partially Buried Contin-

245

246

INDEX

ued, 100–102; physical presence of, 76; as representation, 105–7; resurrection of, 14; as sensory experience, 186–88; as time, 107; transformation into myth, 2. See also archaeology Höller, Carsten, 130 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 82–83, 96, 201 Holocaust, 131, 211n43 Holt, Nancy, 107 home movies, as memory ritual, 176– 77, 181–82 Homes for America (Graham), 189 Hotel Palenque (Smithson), 108, 110 Howell, John, 14 H RR R and H PE (Wilson), 93 Huyssen, Andreas, 164, 211n43 Identity Stretch (Oppenheim), 70 ideology of seeing, 87 Ikeda, Ryoji, 130; Spectra II, 130 Iles, Chrissie, 186, 206 image, and experience, 162–63 Image of Absalon to Be Projected until It Vanishes (Buckingham), 173–74 immersion, and art discourse, 121–23 “I” mode, 124–25, 155 Import/Export Funk Office (Green), 99, 111–12 Incendiary Wafers (Matta-Clark), 47–48 Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan (Smithson), 78, 108 index, 37, 73, 80. See also deictic index indexicality, 32; and presentness, 36 “indexical present,” 63 indexical trace, 37 installation art: archival, 89–91; in art history of contemporary art, 1, 24;

and ephemerality, 2–3, 23, 121, 202; and experience, 1–2, 7–9, 36, 117–19, 127–31; frame and framing in, 41–48, 67–71, 136, 139, 203; as heterotopia, 18–20, 101, 188, 199–200; introduced to museums, 23; light in, 129–30; and memory, 2, 74, 201–7; and modernist painting, 23–27; moving images as, 171–73; perception in, 36, 128–30; performer in, 120–21; relation to photography, 7–9, 27, 118–19; sound in, 183–85. See also names of artists and titles of works Institute for Art and Urban Resources, 28 Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), 13, 129, 194 interpretation, as collaboration, 143 interviews, use in film, 98 Into the Light: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art (exhibition), 206 Ireland, Craig, 7, 121–23 Ireland, Patrick (Brian O’Doherty), 35; Rope Drawing No. 19, 32–34. See also O’Doherty, Brian Irigaray, Luce, This Sex, Which Is Not One, 134 Irwin, Robert, 124 Istanbul Biennial, 131 Ito, Tetsuo, 149 Jacob, Mary Jane, 15 Jameson, Fredric, 195–98, 211n32; “Postmodernism,” 12–13 Jam Handy, 191, 193 Janssens, Ann Veronica, Who’s Afraid of Blue, Red, and Yellow, 129 Japanese internment in World War II, 113

INDEX

Jauss, Hans-Robert, 122 Jay, Martin, 122 Jeanson, Thibault, 143–47, 149, 151–52 John Gibson Gallery, 46 Johns, Jasper, 108 Jones, Amelia, 2–3, 9, 27, 45, 111, 154, 162; Self/Image, 160 journeying through archives, 96–100 Journeys from Berlin (Rainer), 97–99 Jump (Thater and Mason), 189 Kaiper, Bruce, 137 Kapoor, Anish, 129; Past, Present, Future, 129 Kaprow, Allan, 125–26, 128–29, 153, 155–56, 203; Apple Shrine, 126; Happenings and Environments, 8; Six Ordinary Happenings, 156; Transfer, 155–56; Yard, 126 Kaye, Nick, 11, 54 Kelley, Jeff, 156 Kent State University, killings of student protesters at, 3, 72, 78–80, 85, 88–89, 93, 106, 185 Kester, Grant, 211n42 Kim, Hae Sun, 106, 110 Kingsley, April, 64–65 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 84 Kodachrome 64 film, 170 Kodachrome slide film, 103 Kodachrome Super 8 film, 170 Kodak (Dean), 165–71, 169–70, 185 Kodak Company, 165–71, 176; film production, 165–71; and slide show, 102–5 Kodaslide color transparency projector, 103 Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp, 212n49

Koons, Jeff, 13 Korean War, 100–102, 105–9 Korea Slides (Green), 100, 106 Kosuth, Joseph, 28, 41, 65 Kounellis, Jannis, 212n49 Kracauer, Siegfried, 118 Krauss, Rosalind, 28, 36–37, 57, 65–66, 74, 114, 125–27, 213n14, 217n4; “Notes on the Index,” 32, 57, 65–66, 70 Krens, Tho mas, 126–27 Kruger, Barbara, 17, 92 Kwangju, 98, 100–101, 106, 109–10 Kwangju Biennial, 109 Kwon, Miwon, 3, 11–12, 16, 74, 109–10 Labowitz, Leslie, 123 Lacan, Jacques, 160 Lacy, Suzanne, 123 Lambert-Beatty, Carrie, 8 Lampson, Mary, 79 language, as framing device, 62 Latin America, 128–29 Lawler, Louise, 14–15, 24, 58–60, 65–66, 69–70, 92, 204; Arranged by Louise Lawler, 92; untitled work, 60 Lawson, Tho mas, 13–14 layered structure, 190, 196 Lee, Pamela, 42 Le Feuvre, Lisa, 201 Levine, Sherrie, 13 LeWitt, Sol, 89, 94, 96, 114, 205 library card catalog, as found language, 91 Liebmann, Lisa, 14 lieux de mémoire, 182 light, in installation art, 129–30 Line Describing a Cone (McCall), 173

247

248

INDEX

Line Drawing (Swartz), 130 Linker, Kate, 14 Los Alamos, New Mexico, 129–30 Los Angeles Public Library, discarded card catalog, 91 ______, Louise Lawler, Adrian Piper and Cindy Sherman Have Agreed to Participate in an Exhibition Organized by Janelle Reiring at Artists Space . . . , 57–69 Lukács, Georg, History and Class Consciousness, 135 Magellan (Frampton), 96 Manovich, Lev, 77, 99 mantle (Hamilton), 132, 133, 143 Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov), 99 Marclay, Christian, 194 Marcuse, Herbert, 136; One-Dimensional Man, 207 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 138 Marien, Mary Warner, 46–47 Marker, Chris, 97 Marx, Karl, 49 Mary Boone Gallery, 92 Maryland Historical Society, 90 Mason, T. Kelly, Jump, 189 mass media: and amateur photography, 103; Barthes on, 94; and memory, 14, 195; and nostalgia, 192; as source of images, 15, 89; and visual codes, 64 Mass MoCA (North Adams, Massachusetts), 121, 126 materiality, 164–65; of film, 186; and framing, 38; immersive, 128–29; of photographs, 19; of plastic, in Dean’s Kodak, 168

Matta-Clark, Gordon, 28–29, 35, 37, 39, 68, 70, 130, 201, 204–5; Conical Intersect, 48; Doors, Floors, Doors, 33, 34; Incendiary Wafers, 47–48; Museum, 47; Office Baroque, 53; Pier In/Out, 149, 150; Rope Bridge, 42; Splitting, 23–24, 41–57, 51, 53, 55, 153, 204 McCall, Anthony, 186; Line Describing a Cone, 173 media installation, and passage of time, 198–200 media nostalgia, in contemporary art, 188–96 medium (artistic), defined in terms of relationship between viewer and object, 74 mémoire involontaire, 4 mémoire volontaire, 5 memory, 2, 128, 130–31; in art world of 1980s and 1990s, 12–17; commodification of, 14–15; conditioned by technologies, 4; and ephemerality, 165, 178; and experience, 155; in film and video installations in 2000s, 164– 200; in Hamilton’s work, 131–42; as history, 80–81; and installation art, 2, 74, 201–7; materialization of, 18–19, 88; and myth, 75–76; in Partially Buried Continued, 100–102; and perception, 54–56; and photography, 177– 79; reification of, 14–15; and sensation, 128, 186–88; slide show as, 102–5; time as, 107. See also archival memory; bodily memory Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 8 Merzbau (Schwitters), 43 meta-frame, 26

INDEX

Metro Pictures, 92 Metz, Christian, 84 Mexico, 108 Meyer, James, 11, 74, 109 Miami Art Museum, 132 Michener, James, Kent State, 78, 80, 86, 89 Middletown, Connecticut, 155–56 Minimalism, 8, 73–74, 94–95, 126–29, 172, 203 Mining the Museum (Wilson), 90 mirrors, and photography, 42 Miss, Mary, 36, 125, 130; Sapping, 35 “mist installations” (Janssens), 129 Mixed Metaphors (exhibition), 90 modernism, 124, 219n31; decline of, 12–13; and elevation of vision, 43–44; and framing, 24–25; and “futurism,” 195; Matta-Clark’s break with, 42–43; and passage of time, 202 modernist painting, 7; installation art and, 23–27 modernity, 135; and ephemerality, 36, 202 Mondloch, Kate, 127, 172 monument: and document, 80–81; Mount Rushmore, 93 Morris, Robert, 26, 126, 128–29, 132, 154, 161; “Notes on Sculpture,” 94; “The Present Tense of Space,” 124–25, 172 Morris, William, 136 Morse, Margaret, 172, 186 Morse, Samuel F. B., 25 movie theater: as heterotopia, 188; as interior space, 172–73 moving images, as installation art, 171–73

Mullican, Matt, 57 Muñoz, Juan, 212n49 Musée d’art moderne de la ville (Paris), 90, 127 Museum (Matta-Clark), 47 museum industry, 127 Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, 182 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 85–87, 142 museums, and photographic exhibitions, 85–86 Muybridge, Eadweard J., 82, 138; Animal Locomotion: Walking Taking Off Hat, 6; motion studies, 45 myein (Hamilton), 121, 139 Naples, 96–100 narrative: catalog as, 38–40; of decline, 93–94; Green’s work as, 77 narrative structure, 114–15 National Trust (U.K.), 83 Native American history, 93 Nauman, Bruce, Green Light Corridor, 130 Neoconcretist sculpture, 128 Neo-geo movement, 13 Neo-pop, 13 Neo-surrealism, 13 Neto, Ernesto, 128; Walking in Venus Blue Cave, 128–29 networks, photographs and, 88–89 New Bedford, Massachusetts, 90–91 New Dimensions in Sound (Jam Handy), 193 New England Digs (Dion), 90–91 “new genre public art,” 123 Niepce, Nicéphore, 47

249

250

INDEX

No. 782 Apple Advancing (Faller and Frampton), 95 Nora, Pierre, 197, 212n43; “Between Memory and History,” 182 nostalgia, 104, 106, 165, 187–88, 206; Cokes’s use of, 190–94; complexity of, 194–96; as form of critique, 185. See also media nostalgia Nostalgia (Frampton), 96 nostalgia epidemic, 195 Notari, Elvira, 97 objects: “evocative,” 164, 182–86, 189–94, 197–98; materiality of, 130–31 Odessa, Russia, 99 O’Doherty, Brian (Patrick Ireland), 24–26, 28, 43, 52, 68, 124; “Inside the White Cube,” 25 Office Baroque (Matta-Clark), 53 Ohio Historical Society, 118 Oiticica, Hélio, 8, 128–29 Olander, William, 14–15, 17 One of Each (Bott), 91 On New York 11 (Williams), 15 On the Road: Art against AIDS (exhibition), 17 Oppenheim, Dennis, 35, 42, 68; Broken Record Blues, 30, 70; Identity Stretch, 70 Ossining, New York, 179–80 O’Sullivan, Timothy, 87 outmoded media, as “evocative objects,” 182–86, 189–94, 197–98 Owens, Craig, 4, 10–11, 42, 108, 202, 204 panorama format, for photographing installation art, 145, 147 panoramas, 145–46

parergon, 26–27, 37, 67–69 Partially Buried (Green), 72, 98, 110, 185 Partially Buried Continued (Green), 75, 89, 98, 100–111, 186 Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts (Green), 3, 72–73, 75–76, 78–80, 79, 81, 85, 88–89, 93–94, 101, 114, 184–85 Partially Buried Woodshed (Robert Smithson, 1970), 3, 72, 75, 101, 205 participation, and art discourse, 121–23 Past, Present, Future (Kapoor), 129 Pat Hearn Gallery (New York), 78–79 Peace for the Temporal Highway (Harris), 34–35 perception, 128; Bergsonian “scientific” approach to, 45–46; and consciousness, 214n18; in installation art, 36, 128–30; and memory, 54–56 performance art, 120–21 performer, in installation art, 120–21 Peru, 180–81 phenomenological vector, 217n4 photo album, as structuring principle, 166–67 photographic archives, 201; as death, 84, 161; pre- and postwar, 75; as supplement to installation art, 119 photographic impulse, 133 photographic installation, 91–93 photographic series, 84–85 photographs: ambivalence of, 67; as artifacts, in installation art, 80; and aura of work of art, 5; character of, 5; as contingency, 38; as death, 161; denaturalizing and defetishizing, 87; as discourse, 44, 46; distancing effect of, 118; as documents, 108–9, 147, 160;

INDEX

and edges of images, 25; as evidence, 84; as fetishes, 84; as fine art, 86–87; as fragment in series, 80–85; as frame, 70; as framed object, 199; fried, 46; inadequacy of, 35–36, 154–56; as indexes, 37, 63, 73, 80; limitations of, 1; and mémoire volontaire, 5; as memories, 9–10; and mirrors, 42; offframe space of, 84–85; as paradigm for Green’s critical practice, 110–11; proliferation of, in 19th and 20th centuries, 83; in science and industry, 5–6; as “that has been,” 82 photography: architectural, 145–46; as archive, 73; and contingency, 44; as documentation, 52, 142–47; as exploration of time, 82; inability to capture experience, 153–54; as language, 57; linked to archive and museum collection, 83; and memory, 177–79; modernist, 147; post-mortem, 104; role of frame in, 41–48; and Rooms exhibition, 35–57; as self-sustaining process, 41–42; in site-specific installation art, 72–77 photography, theory of, 2; as technology of vision, 19–20 photography exhibitions, 85–89 photojournalism, conventions of, 110 picture is still, the (Hamilton), 116–21, 134, 137, 143–45, 147–54, 148, 151, 151–52, 154, 156–57 Pictures (exhibition), 66–67 Pier In/Out (Matta-Clark), 149, 150 Pincus-Witten, Robert, 201 Pindell, Howardena, 35; Video Drawings, 29

pinhole camera, 157, 160–62 Piper, Adrian, 14, 24, 58, 62–66, 69–70, 92, 204–5; “indexical present,” 63 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 108 Pistoletto, Michelangelo, 212n49 Places with a Past (exhibition), 15 plastic, materiality of, in Dean’s Kodak, 168 Pollock, Jackson, 203 Pompeii, ruins of, 98 portrait photography, 156–62, 179 postcolonial politics, 123 postmedium practices, 203 postmodernism, 195 Pozzi, Lucio, 29, 32 present: grasp of, in twentieth century, 35–36; indexical, 63 presentness, 124; conventions of, 42 Prince, Richard, 15 Prins, Gwyn, 63 Prix, Wolf, 146 protagonist, identification with, 97, 99–100 Proust, Marcel, 5; Remembrance of Thing s Past, 177–78 Providence, Rhode Island, 90–91 PS1 arts space (Queens, New York), 23, 27–29 punctum, 161 Quandt, James, 171, 183 Rabinowitch, David, 29 Rainer, Yvonne, 8, 97; Journeys from Berlin, 97–98 RCA Company, 190–94 reading, of image, 63, 74, 85, 87, 100, 109, 113, 115, 161, 204 recorded music, social effects of, 190–94

251

252

INDEX

recording technologies, 88–89, 190–94; development of, 83–84; as “evocative objects,” 182–83 Reiring, Janelle, 57–58, 64–65, 68 Reiss, Julie, 2 relational aesthetics, 8–9 relational antagonism, 9 Rembrandt, 4 Remembering Vietnam (Barber), 15 Renaissance painting, 160 representation: history as, 105–7; politics of, 72–115, 202 retro, 194–95. See also nostalgia Richter, Gerhard, 75–76, 212n49 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 139 Rist, Pipilotti, 160 Rogers, Alva, 15 room in pursuit of a position (Hamilton), 120 Rooms (exhibition), 23, 27–29, 68, 91, 130, 153, 204; catalog, 38–40; and framing of interaction between artwork, exhibition space, and viewer, 29–35; and photography, 35–57 Rope Bridge (Matta-Clark), 42 Rope Drawing No. 19 (Ireland), 32–34 Rosler, Martha, 14, 73; Global Taste, 15 Royoux, Jean-Christophe, 167 Rudolph, Paul, 85–86 Rushmore, Mount, 93 Ruskin, John, 136 Ryman, Robert, untitled work from Rooms exhibition, 31 “safety” film, 176 Salcedo, Doris, 130–31 Saltzman, Lisa, Making Memory Matter, 17

Sandler, Irving, 57 Santos, René, 14 Sapping (Miss), 35 Schwitters, Kurt, Merzbau, 43 screens, artist’s focus on, 172 sculptural practice, 213n14 Searching for Spiral Jetty (Dean), 167 Seattle Art Museum, 90 Sekula, Allan, 62, 73, 80, 85, 87, 201 sensation, and recollection, 128, 130–31 senses, transposition of, 158 sensory experience, history and memory as, 186–88 Seoul, 98 serial structure, 101, 111 Serra, Richard, 28, 30–31, 68, 124, 128–29; Torqued Ellipses, 130 Shapolsky et al (Haacke), 91 Sharp, Willoughby, 42 Sheeler, Charles, 165 Sherman, Cindy, 15, 17, 24, 57–58, 64, 66, 68–70, 92, 204 shifter, the, 36–37 Simon, Joan, 120, 143 Simpson, Lorna, 15 simulacra, and reality, 13 Singerman, Howard, 16 single-point perspective, 43–44 site-specific art, 3, 10–12, 70, 154, 204; ephemeral, 42, 202; and frames, 48–50; introduced to museums, 23; photography and, 72–77 site-specificity, defining, 74 Situation Leading to a Story (Buckingham), 171, 173–76, 175, 178–86, 180, 184 Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the Year 502,002 C.E. (Buckingham), 93

INDEX

Six Ordinary Happenings (Kaprow), 156 Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion (Frampton), 95, 95 slide projection, as bridge between photography and film, 107 slide show: as “common space,” 105; family, 105–7; as memory, 102–5; recontextualization of, 101; as travelogue, 108–9 Smith, Valerie, 57 Smithson, Robert, 10–11, 18, 42, 49, 73, 88, 101, 107–9, 202; Hotel Palenque, 108, 110; Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan, 78, 108; legacy, 77–78, 167; Partially Buried Woodshed, 3, 72, 75, 101, 205; Spiral Jetty, 10–11, 167, 202, 226n4 Smyth, Ned, Last Supper, 29 snapshots, 100, 103–5, 109–11, 166, 179 Sokolowski, Tho mas, 17 Solomon, Holly and Horace, 50 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 14 Some Chance Operations (Green), 96–100 sound, in installation art, 183–85 spatial arts, 155 spectacle, and art discourse, 121–23 Spectra II (Ikeda), 130 Spiral Jetty (Smithson), 10–11, 167, 202, 226n4 Splitting (Matta-Clark), 23–24, 41–57, 51, 53, 55, 153, 204 Staniszewski, Mary Ann, 86 Steichen, Edward, 85–86 Steinbach, Haim, 13 Stewart, Susan, 143 Stuart, Michelle, 29, 32 studium, 161

Stull, Henry, Black Race Horse, 58 Sublime Void, The: On the Memory of the Imagination (exhibition), 212n49 Sugimoto, Hiroshi, 14–15 suitably positioned (Hamilton), 120 Summers, David, 44 supplement, and contingency, 203 Surrealism, 43 Svilova, Elizaveta, 99 Swartz, Julianne, Line Drawing, 130 Szarkowski, John, 87 Taaffe, Philip, 13 Tagg, John, 201 Teignmouth Electron (Dean), 166 Terdiman, Richard, 212n43 text, use of, 59–62 Tha ter, Diana, Jump, 189 Thompson, E. P., 122–23, 135–36, 155 Tibbets, Col. Paul W., Jr., 117–18 time: and bodily experience, 172, 199; experience of, 172, 176; history as, 107; materialization of, 13; in MattaClark’s Splitting, 54–56; as memory, 107; modernism and, 202; passage of, in media installation, 198–200 time-motion studies, 138 Torqued Chandelier Release (Graham), 189 Torqued Ellipses (Serra), 130 “total cinema,” 96 To the Rescue: Eight Artists in an Archive (exhibition), 93 Transfer (Kaprow), 155–56 Transplanted (Donovan), 129 travelogue, slide show as, 108–9 tropos (Hamilton), 140, 143 Turkle, Sherry, 164

253

254

INDEX

Turrell, James, 129 Tuttle, Richard, 30–31 Underground (film), 79 Urban Crude: The Oil Fields of the Los Angeles Basin (CLUI), 91 Venice Biennale, 121 Vertov, Dziga, Man with a Movie Camera, 99 video, 3, 9–10, 20–21, 23, 89; as archive, 97; and bodily experience, 160; and evacuation of historical perspective, 195–96; in installation art, 72 video and film installations, 15, 22, 171–73. See also names of artists and titles of works Video Drawings (Pindell), 29 video screen, 113; embodied, 160 video stills, 29 Vienna, 131 viewer, relationship with artwork and exhibition space, 29–35 “viewer space,” 44 viewing, act of, 57–65 “vinegar syndrome,” 174 vinyl LPs, 190–94 vision, as supreme aesthetic sense, 43–44 Visitation of Insomnia, A (Frampton), 95 visual codes, and mass media, 64 visual distortion, 120 von Schlegell, David, 120

Walking in Venus Blue Cave (Neto), 128–29 Wall, Jeff, 212n49, 219n31 Wallis, Brian, 94 wandering, and relationship of viewer to installation, 99–100 Warburg, Aby, 75 Watney, Simon, 16 Weathermen, 79 weavers, 134–36 Weems, Carrie Mae, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 92 Weil, Sue, 35 Weiss, David, 189 Welchman, John C., 26 West, Nancy Martha, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia, 104 Wexler, Haskell, 79 Wheeler, Doug, 29 white cube, 25–26, 28, 34, 43, 117, 133, 199–200, 206 Whiteread, Rachel, 212n49 Whitney Museum of American Art, 186; Biennial (2006), 189 Who’s Afraid of Blue, Red, and Yellow (Janssens), 129 Williams, Christopher, On New York 11, 15 Wilson, Fred, 88, 92–93; Mining the Museum, 90 Winer, Helene, 57 Winsor, Jackie, 134; Bound Square, 134 wish image, 167, 185, 190, 194, 197 X-PRZ, 190

Wagner, Anne, 52, 56 waiting, and duration, 56 walking, practice of, 97; Green and, 99

Yard (Kaprow), 126 Yokosuka, Japan, 117